Register a new account during February 2012 and at 18:30GMT on February 29th, and you will be able to compete against your fellow newcomers for a chance to win a share of a €2,500 prizepool.

Don’t forget that as a new player, you will also be entitled to a 200% First Deposit Bonus, as well as two entries into our €1,000 New Player Freeroll for the first two Saturdays after you register.

Tournament Details

It’s a great time to play at Poker Heaven, why not join us today?

Check out our site for more details.

Last year there were a record-breaking 58 bracelets won but three more will be awarded this year. Harrah’s Entertainment, the owners of the WSOP brand, have said they will always try to makes the series bigger and better than ever but it makes one wonder when this will come to an end. In 2025 will there be 145 events? Something has to give and it will happen sooner rather than later.

There have been a number of changes to this year’s WSOP, the 43^rd in history, including only having seven $10,000 World Championship events but a massive 23 tournaments with a buy-in of just $1,500. It appears that the WSOP is trying to appeal to the masses once again and not just hardened poker players and professionals. Other changes include the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino creating space for an additional 92 tables, meaning the total capacity for a single day is 4,700 which has also lead to the Main Event only having three starting days instead of the four.

Keeping with the Main Event, many thought we had seen the last of the November Nine thanks to a a little bit of misdirection delivered by the Twitter account of the WSOP. The person behind the WSOP account announced that we would no longer be seeing the November Nine and whilst this is true to some degree it is not entirely the full story. The November Nine is gone but it will be replaced with the October Nine for this series due to the original plans clashing with the US Presidential elections on November 6, so love it or hate it the delayed Main Event final table looks like it is set to remain part of the WSOP.

There are three new events added to the schedule this year, a $3,000 No Limit Hold’em / Pot Limit Omaha heads-up event, a $5,000 Mixed Hold’em (mixed as in different table sizes) event, a $2,500 buy-in four-handed No Limit Hold’em event and a $1,500 Ante-Only tournament. In addition to these new events there are also two one-day non-bracelet events taking place during the series to inject a little fun into proceedings. One is the $560 buy-in “Doubles” event and the other being a $560 bounty tournament. Both should give the players some respite from the intense poker action.

Last an most certainly not least is a one-off tournament that has a $1,000,000 entry fee! One million dollars! The Big One for One Drop starts at 1:11 on July 1 and sees $111,111 from each player’s buy-in donated to the One Drop charity, which was set up by the multi-billionaire and some would say poker fish Guy Laliberte who also happens to be the founder of the Cirque du Soleil. It should be interesting, to say the least, to see who is prepared to pay a million dollars to play in a poker tournament.

As soon as we have details on WSOP satellites on Poker Heaven we will bring them to you. See you in Las Vegas!

Ivey had disappeared from the live and online poker scene for the vast majority of last year with his only notable appearance being in the APPT Macau Main Event where he failed to make it into the money despite being one of the chip leaders at one stage of the tournament.

Then at the start of the year there were more Ivey sightings, again in Macau where he was playing in the “Big Game,” a cash game with blinds of $1,300/$2,600 and people wondered f he would make the relatively short distance to Melbourne to play in some of the Aussie Millions events. He did sure enough, finishing 12^th in the $10,600 Main Event before registering for the $250,000 Super High Roller, along with 15 other very familiar faces.

Amongst those who had thought it was a good idea to put $250,000 on the line in a single tournament included Jason Mercier, the $100,000 Challenge winner Dan Smith, Sam Trickett, John Juanda, Sorel Mizzi and last year’s winner Erik Seidel. However, none of these players made it to the top three spots where the money was paid out and whilst they would have been disappointed not to cash their pain will not have felt anything like Daniel Negreanu’s. Why? Because he was the player who burst one of the biggest money bubbled in history.

With blinds at 25,000/50,000/5,000a Negreanu three-bet all-in with As8d over the top of Antonius’ 100,000 opening raise and the Finnish superstar snap-called with JcJd. The board ran out Qh-7d-4c-9c-10d and with that Negreanu was eliminated in fourth place and sent to the rail empty handed whilst the surviving three players knew they had locked up at least $800,000 for their efforts.

The first player to pick up this amount was ‘The Great Dane’ Gus Hansen. He got his chips into the middle on a flop reading Kd-Jc-4c holding Kc8s against Ivey only to discover the eight-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner was sat there with Jh4h for two pair. The Js on the turn improved Ivey to a full house and when the 9h landed on the river Hansen was sent packing whilst the media dug in for a mouth-watering heads-up match between Ivey and Antonius.

Ivey lead by around 2,200,000 to 1,800,000 and things remained rather level until around 45-minutes into the battle when Ivey scooped a huge pot that left him with a seven-to-one chip advantage. This left Antonius in push-or-fold territory and push he did, with Ks3d, straight into Ivey’s AhQd. The 3c-6s-5s gifted Antonius the lead but the Qc on the turn meant the Finn had to spike a king on the river or become the runner-up. The dealer burned a card and put out the 8s on the river, busting Antoinus and crowning Ivey as the $250,000 Super High Roller champion.

Aussie Millions Super High Roller Results

1st: Phil Ivey: $2,000,000
2nd: Patrik Antonius: $1,200,000
3rd: Gus Hansen: $800,000

The awards ceremony took place at the famous Aviation Club de France in Paris and was attended by some of the most familiar faces in the business, though Trickett was not present due to participating in various events and cash games at the Aussie Millions. The group for European Player of the Year contained some fantastic players as you would expect with Trickett’s rivals in this category being Triple Crown winners Jake Cody and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Eugene Katchalov, World Series of Poker Main Event champion Pius Heinz and Andrey Pateychuk.

The judges had a difficult time choosing a winner as any of the men would be worthy recipients of the award but they finally settled on Trickett after his amazing year at the felt. Over the course of 2011 Trickett won just shy of $4,600,000 and did so in emphatic style. He kicked off 2011 by winning the $100,000 Challenge at the Aussie Millions then just a few days later he finished as a runner-up to Erik Seidel in the $250,000 Super High Roller event, again at the Aussie Millions. Most players would have simply put their feet up and taken it easy for the rest of the year but Trickett is not most players, instead he upped his volume and went on to cash in seven more major live tournaments, reaching the final table of four of them and also winning the Partouche Poker Tour Main Event.

Trickett’s friends and fans flooded his Facebook page with congratulations and adulations though some appeared there before Trickett himself had heard the news. Upon discovering he had been announced as the European Player of the Year Trickett updated his status and said, “Just found out I Won European play of the Year! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Three of Trickett’s fellow nominees also scooped awards. Grospellier picked up the Julian Gardner Personality of Poker award, Heinz picked up the gong for Best Tournament Performance whilst Pateychuk became the Rookie of the Year for winning EPT San Remo and WPT Prague and coming 15^th in the WSOP Main Event.

Smith is a poker pro based in Las Vegas but you would be forgiven for having never heard of him. Prior to this win Smith had some impressive results to his name in live tournaments around the world including two recent scores in London where he finished third in a £2,000 event at EPT London for £66,600 and then a fourth place finish in the £10,000 High Roller Six Max that netted him £61,400 but now he has a seven-figure score to his name after this superb result.

The first day of play saw the 22 entrants whittled down to the final eight but of these eight remaining players only four of them made it to the money. At the start of play Nam Le was sent to the rail and he was followed by British pro Sam Trickett, Sorel Mizzi and finally Gus Hansen, the latter bursting the bubble when his AsJc could not win the flip against Mikhail Smirnov’s pair of tens.

Hansen’s elimination meant the last four players in the tournament had locked up no less than $242,000 but that soon increased when the infamous Tony G lost his chips. Not long after Tony G was eliminated was he joined by the former World Series of Poker Main Event champion and local hero Joe Hachem, leaving Smith and Smirnov to fight it out one-on-one for the title and the $1,012,000 first place prize.

The chip lead exchanged hands a number of times but it seems like it was Smith’s destiny to win as he won two crucial flips that cost Smirnov dearly. The first saw Smith’s pocket sixes hold against Smirnov’s ace-queen then the final hand saw Smirnov move his last six big blinds in with Qh6h and Smith was prepared to take the coinflip with his lowly deuces, which held to send his Russian opponent to the rail with 616,000 Austrailian dollars to keep him company!

If you thought that buy-in was huge then wait a couple of days for the $250,000 Super High Roller to take place! As usual Poker Heaven will bring you all the news from that event.

Aussie Millions $100,000 Challenge Results

1st: Dan Smith: $1,012,000
2nd: Mikhail Smirnov: $616,000
3rd: Joe Hachem: $330,000
4th: Tony G: $242,000

Brothers Sean and Michael Ruane, 18 and 23-years old respectively, and their cousin Thomas Freeman Jr, also 18, were travelling back from the Bahamas to the United States of America with the aforementioned cash on their person. But it has become apparent that they fell foul of local laws by not declaring the amount of money they had whilst awaiting clearance at Lynden Pindling International Airport in Nassau, Bahamas.

The trio split the money amongst themselves, the brothers carrying $9,400 each and their cousin the remaining $7,358 but they failed to realise that the US laws, which require a declaration form to be completed in the event of an excess of $10,000 in cash being brought into the country, applied to families and not individuals. The authorities became suspicious when Sean Ruane became nervous and was sweating so they searched the brothers again and when the cash was discovered they were detained and put before Deputy Chief Magistrate Carolita Bethell.

Through their defence attorney Keith Seymore, the three students admitted their guilt but argued they had made an innocent mistake because they believed the $10,000 limit applied to individuals and not families but Deputy Chief Magistrate Bethall was not having any of it and order the money to be confiscated immediately. However, she refrained from fining them further or even imposing a custodial sentence as none of the three had previous criminal records.

Upon confiscating the month Bethell said, “All you had to do was fill out a form, instead you intended to deceive the officers at the pre-clearance. And now you’ve lost all this sum of money. The confiscation of funds is punishment enough. The conviction remains.”

If you find yourself travelling to the USA, or any other country for that matter, to play poker and have a large sum of money about your person Poker Heaven advises you to check with the local authorities about the rules for bringing cash into and taking out of a particular country.

That game seemed to fade out as the focus switched to online poker but around 18 months ago news started to circulate about another high stakes cash game being played but not in Las Vegas but at the other side of the world in Macau. It was a game made up mainly of billionaire and multi-millionaire businessmen with a handful of well-known pros thrown in for good measure. The likes of Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey immediately jumped on a plane and if reports are true then both returned back to home soil with millions of dollars more than they left with.

Now it appears Gus Hansen can put himself in the same camp as Ivey and Dwan as those who have won huge because he is reported to be up almost $4,000,000 in the past week, not bad work if you can get it. Hansen is only in Macau as he is on his way to the 2012 Aussie Millions in Melbourne and decided to stop off on his way for some relaxation. However, he simply has not had time to relax at all as he has been playing marathon sessions at the Poker King Club inside the StarWorld Hotel and Casino where the blinds have been the equivalent to $1,300/$2,600.

Hansen, who won the 2007 Aussie Millions Main Event, wrote about the cash games in his blog saying he had to leave them in order to sleep because they ran for so long! “Maybe I am just getting older but I never thought I would see an entire group outlasting me at the poker table? These guys have stamina like marathon runners — session after session they keep on going and although I tried to hang with them for a while, I was so tired in the end I had to throw in the towel, give up and go to bed.”

It has been the most impressive 18-months for Hansen who seemingly cannot do any wrong at the felt. Many of his peers said he was a massive fish in online cash games and his results seemed to agree as he was down more than $8,000,000 but since he won the £10,000 High Roller Heads Up at the World Series of Poker Europe he has been unbeatable! He won the Poker Million in December 2010, came third in the $25,000 Heads Up event at the WSOP in 2011 and finished as online poker’s biggest winner during 2011 with profits of more than $3,900,000 despite only playing from January to April! I wish I was a fish!

If Hansen keeps winning in the Macau Big Game at the rate he has been doing it will cast into doubt his appearance at the Aussie Millions. Will he show or won’t he? Poker Heaven will let you know!

John Dibella

Forty-three year old stock trader Dibella started the day fifth in chips with a stack of 3,465,000 which itself was a hindrance as he had under the average stack. He was also the only player on the eight-handed final table not to list “professional poker player” as his occupation, and he had a horrendous seat that was sandwiched directly between Faraz Jaka and Xuan Liu and have both Ruben Visser and Kyle Julius either side of those. But despite all of this he is the man who will go into the history books as the champion, a worthy champion and a champion who qualified for his seat by wining a $1,000 live satellite!

Prior to this tournament Dibella had live tournament winnings of less than $43,000 and had guaranteed to more than triple that total just by reaching the final table, as eight place paid out $156,400. But as the likes of Visser, David Bernstein, Anthony Gregg and Mark Drover were eliminated, the prize money increased substantially and he was now guaranteed at least $600,000 for his efforts over the past week.

This potentially life-changing sum of money was then increased even more when Liu, the only woman in PCA history to make it to the final table of the Main Event, was eliminated in fourth place when here Ad7d lost tot the Ah6d of Jaka when the latter flopped two pair on the diminutive yet hugely talented Canadian. Despite helping himself to Liu’s chips Jaka was the next person to head to the cashier’s cage after a clash with Julius left him seated with nothing but air in front of him where his chips once were. He saw Julius move all in from the small blind with what turned out to be Ks10c and Jaka called off his last 2,225,000  (blinds 150,000/300,000/40,000a)with AsJs. Julius spiked a ten on the flop then hit a ten on the turn so when the ace of clubs made an appearance on the river it was too little too late for Jaka and the Main Event had reached the heads-up stage.

With arguably the most dangerous player out of the way the last two men standing decided to strike a deal that saw both of them lock up $1,500,000 each and $275,000 left for the eventual winner. The one-on-one encounter took less than an hour to complete and it went the way of Dibella. With blinds and antes now topping the scales at 200,000/400,000/50,000a Julius opened the betting with a raise to 825,000 and Dibella smooth-called. The Ac-Qh-3c flop saw Dibella check, then call when Julius made a continuation bet of 725,000. Dibella checked the arrival of the 8d on the turn and Julius checked behind. The dealer put out the 10c on the river and now Dibella bet 1,000,000 exactly but Julius was not done with the hand, instead he raised all in for around 5,500,000 and Dibella snapped his hand off, turning over 6c5c for a flush leaving Julius to reveal 9d6s for complete air, probably trying to represent the exact hand his opponent held!

With Julius’ demise Dibella had become the last man standing and had turned his $1,000 satellite into $1,775,000! Congratulations from everyone at Poker Heaven.

PCA Final Table Results

1st: John Dibella: $1,775,000
2nd: Kyle Julius: $1,500,000
3rd: Faraz Jaka: $755,000
4th: Xuan Liu: $600,000
5th: Mark Drover: $468,000
6th: Anthony Gregg: $364,000
7th: David Bernstein: $260,000
8th: Ruben Visser: $156,400

This January we’re bringing you another €50,000 Race with a whopping €13,500 available to the winner!

Last year we awarded over €400,000 in cash prizes in our races. In 2012, we want to go even further, starting with our January race running from the 16th to the 30th January 2012.

How do I play?

It is very easy to take part. Simply access the Casino Games on either Poker Heaven, Blackjack Heaven or Winner Heaven and play the games. For every €10 wagered on casino games, you can win between 1 and 5 points. You can even monitor your progress in The Player Zone.

There are no excluded games so every penny you wager will count towards your leaderboard position!

Check out the Promotional Page for details.

But for eight players morale is at an all time high as they have reached the final table where they are guaranteed to walk away with no less than $156,400 for their efforts over the past week and all have a realistic chance of leaving the Bahamas with $2,000,000, a Shamballa Bracelet worth $20,000 and the title of 2012 PCA Main Event Champion.

Sat at the top of the chip counts, but only just, when play resumes this afternoon is Faraz Jaka who is also better known as “The Toilet” in online poker circles. Jaka will start the day armed with 6,470,000 chips and with the media referring to him as the chip leader but there is less than one big blind separating him and his nearest two rivals. Second place belongs to Kyle “Kljulius10” Julius and his 6,450,000 stack. Julius is guaranteed to win his biggest-ever prize in poker regardless of where he finishes at the final table. Primarily an online player, Julius’ largest score to date tops the scales at $87,00 which he was awarded for taking down the Sunday 500 in earlier this month.

The third placed player is the diminutive Xuan Liu of Toronto, Canada who becomes the first-ever woman to appear at the final table of a PCA Main Event.Twenty-five year old Liu already has a reputation for being extremely talented and fearless, something she probably picked up at Waterloo University in Ontario where the likes of Mike “Timex” McDonald, Glen Chorny, Michael Watts and Steve-Paul Ambrose all studied.

Making up the rest of the final table are Dutchman Ruben Visser (4,440,000 chips), John Dibella (3,645,000), David Bernstein (1,960,000), Mark Drover (1,430,000) and Anthony Gregg (1,160,000). The short-stacked Gregg finished as runner-up in this very event back in 2009 and although he has a lot of work to make it happen, winning in 2012 would be an amazing story.

Remember to tune back into us here at Poker Heaven to find out who the 2012 PCA Main Event champion is.