Representatives of the tournament with a guaranteed HKD 2,000,000 main event hape they can ride on the success of the Macau Million which had the biggest prize pool for a poker tournament in Asia. Fred Leung marketing manager of PokerStars Macau said: “As we enter the eleventh Macau Poker Cup we have a chance to make it ten consecutive MPCs of growth and prize pool records. It’s a special and exciting time to be part of the PokerStars team in Macau and work with the amazing organization at Grand Lisboa.” The MPC consists of six events including a Knockout Bounty tournament, charity event, a No-Limit Hold ‘ em event, a deep-stack and finally the Red Dragon Main Event. All of these poker online events will be held at the Grand Lisboa hotel in Macau. All events of the Macau Poker Cup will count for the Asia Player of the Year (APOY).

The winner of the APOY receives a year sponsorship of the online poker site PokerStars Macau. The online poker player Raymond Wu currently leads the rankings.

After winning the poker tournament, the Londoner stood at over £1.6 million profit in live tournaments and proved his position as one of the best online poker players in the UK. Neil Channing reached the final table with a big chip lead, but George White, Keith Johnson and Ricky Mackintosh also had deep stacks. The other players had a lot of work to do, but could not keep up against Channing. The first poker players to be eliminated from the final table were Victor Ilyukhin, Jeff Kimber, Joe Grech, Les Fenton, Ricky Mackin But Carlo and Citron respectively. George White at some point must have thought he was invincible after hitting pocket aces four times in a row, but he eventually lost and came in fourth place.

Odetoyinbo managed to survive Keith Johnson, who lost with pocket 7 against the ace-king of Channing. Finally Odetoyinbo was defeated, he won a prize of £43,500 for second place. Neil Channing wins the £64,050 and a chair for the Champion of Champions event, an exclusive poker tournament for winners of the GUKPT and similar tournaments.

Playing mostly Omaha, the poker pro won a cool $1.4 million including over a quarter million dollars from Patrick Anthony during the “Durrrr challenge. The next challenger in the ‘durrrr’challenge, “jungleman12″ won in August more than $225,000 and won more than 2.5 million dollar. Tom Dwan leads the world poker rankings of 2010 with $4.7 million profit, Phil Ivey is second with 2.5 million and “jungleman12″ with a little less in third place. Ivey and Galfond where this month also on the list for most winnings, with earnings of $758.000 and $566.000 respectively.

The biggest loser in August in the poker online industry is Gus Hansen, who lost more than $850,000, mainly in the Pot Limit Omaha games.

The Balkans PokerStars Poker Festival as it will be called, is scheduled for 2 to 5 September this year at the Grand Hotel and Casino in the Golden Sands resort in Bulgaria. Thanks to the buy-in of € 990  approximately 200 poker players from Europe are expected to join in the No-Limit Hold’em tournament. The winner will receive the € 5.300 buy-in for the European Poker Tour in Prague. The five-star Golden Sands Resort is located approximately 17 km. north of Varna in Bulgaria. The hotel is known for its magnificent views, exclusive bars and the largest poker room in Bulgaria. Some PokerStars tournaments continue to attract more visitors.

For example, William Thorson won the Baltic Poker Festival last month with a prize of € 83.823 and had to beat 221 professional poker players to win it. Poker Satellites for the Balkan Festival are playing on PokerStars in different games and buy-ins levels.

There were a lot of celebrities, but Shannon Elizabeth, Trishelle Cannatella as Sam Simon were all eliminated. The most surprising player who got eliminated was the professional online poker pro Phil Ivey. Ivey is one of the best poker online and heads-up players in the world, and in the WSOP in 2009, he battled through a field of 6,488 poker players to finish seventh on the final table. Ivey won’t be on the final table this year, he was eliminated on day 2b. Ivey played pocket queens against pocket kings, and even though he hit a queen on the turn, he was eliminated when his opponent made trip kings on the river.

In addition to Ivey, the professional online poker players Doyle Brunson and Chris Ferguson where also eliminated. The biggest controversy of the day happened when Prahlad Friedman was accused of making a call, just when the time on the call clock had expired. The dealer did not hear the call and threw them in the muck. Ted Bort was furious because he would have eliminated Friedman, if he had  called.

This year the Main Event will have four separate starting days and two separate 2nd days, where the remaining players from two of the four starting days are mixed on every second day. After the fiasco at last year’s WSOP, where poker online players on the last day of registration had no option but to leave by a lack of space,the WSOP changed the registration for the Main Event. Players can now register in advance for a specific start day, but if the day is full, they have to choose a different start day.

This will also contribute to a more balanced Day 2, which saw a clear difference in the number of players in comparence to the Main Event of last year. The wait is finally over, when the immortal words: “Shuffle up and deal” are spoken, the 2010 WSOP Main Event starts.

High Stakes Poker pro Phil Ivey seems to have climbed effortlessly to the second position of the top money winners on Full Tilt Poker in 2010, after he managed to win $ 579,000 on the site. Although Ivey has played less hours than many of his fellow poker pros at the virtual tables of Full Tilt Poker, he is very efficient with his play time whenever he is seen playing. He showed this in his effort last week when he won $ 579,000 with only 1474 hands, that landed him just behind Tom ‘Durrrr’ Dwan’s profit ranking. Phil Ivey constantly proved his reign in the high-stakes poker cash games over the years and his impressive $ 2,000,000 profit to date, shows his dominance in online poker, which yields him seven figures each year. Phil Ivey earned  $ 1,990,000 playing poker online at Full Tilt Poker in 2007, in 2008 $ 7,340,000 and $ 6,330,000 in 2009. Now with the 2010 WSOP in sight, the seven times bracelet winner Phil Ivey will certainly focus on obtaining more titles in the poker event. Ivey made a side-bet with fellow poker pro and business partner Howard Lederer for $ 5,000,000 that Ivey would not be able to add two more WSOP bracelets to his repertoire by the end of the 2011 season.