Winners & Losers: Tournaments Heat Up, Nevada Cools Down, Crime Doesn’t Pay

Photo: http://www.wsop.com

Topics: Epic Poker League, Winners and Losers, WSOP Circuit, PCA, Viktor Blom [+]

Thanks to a lively WSOP Circuit event in Los Angeles and PokerStars annual tournament in the Bahamas, tournament poker has hit the ground running to start off 2012. Numerous people have found their way into the spotlight for their work on the felt, though some managed to see it in some interesting ways. With all the poker going on around the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget Las Vegas is the gaming mecca, and they are noticing it. With decreased revenues and more casino bosses speaking out against online gambling, it’s looking like Nevada has been enduring a bumpy ride for some time. Before we look at that though, let’s see the players that did manage to do well this week:

Winners

Viktor “isildur1” Blom – The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 Super High Roller event attracted top competition and let to a (naturally) stacked final table with some of the biggest names in poker. Viktor Blom became the 2012 PCA Super High Roller champion, taking out nearly everyone at the final table in the process. Blom defeated a final table most of us would not want to be a part of, with Daniel Negreanu, Jonathan Duhamel, Galen Hall, and Dan Shak rounding out the list of the people that cashed. (The three final-table players who didn’t cash – Humberto Brenes, Mike McDonald, and Scott Seiver – have won four bracelets and three other major titles, including two in 2011.) Viktor pocketed $1.25 million for his victory, and given the volatile nature of his play, we expect he will put that money to work, if he hasn’t done so already.

La Sengphet – From high stakes poker to poker for the masses, a rising star on the WSOP Circuit deserves a mention here. La Sengphet, a poker pro out of Dallas, Texas, recently captured her third WSOP Circuit ring in less than a year, besting a group of 377 players to win the $345 event at The Bicycle Club in Los Angeles. Three Circuit-event wins in one year is an enviable and impressive feat. Sengphet is also the first woman in WSOP history to come up with the three rings, and given her track record we fully expect that she’s going to keep breaking that record for quite some time. Players have definitely grinded their way from the circuit events to the “bigger” events of the WSOP and WPT (just ask Dwyte Pilgrim), so it’s possible we’ll see her scoring in the biggest events soon enough.

Randy “nanonoko” Lew – And now on to online poker, where Team PokerStars Online Pro Randy Lew, otherwise known online as nanonoko, decided to go after a world record while at PCA. The record, playing the most hands in eight hours while still making a profit, was down to the wire, with Lew completing it while winning only $7.65 total after over 24,000 hands, according to the PokerStars Blog. This came out to 48.94 hands every single minute, which means a hand completed nearly every second, and the number of actions he took had to be many more than that. To be able to pull off this world record and still make money (no matter how small) is a pretty impressive feat.

Losers

Nevada Casinos – Remember when “gambling” meant “Las Vegas”? Not enough people do, at least for the Nevada casinos’ comfort. Well, unfortunately for casinos across Nevada, 2011 wasn’t a very good year. According to Howard Stutz of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Nevada Gaming Control Board reported that casinos across the state swallowed a $3.99 billion loss for the year. In Las Vegas alone the loss was pretty staggering, at $2.2 billion. What’s stranger still is that revenue was actually up for the year, but continued issues in the US economy and the bankruptcy troubles some casino companies have faced led to the decline. Hopefully if the economy improves in 2012, the plight of some of the casinos in 2012, for others though…

M Resort President Anthony Marnell III – …we may see a dip in revenue if boycotts against casinos for anti-online stances actually bite. Coming off Las Vegas Sands CEO President Sheldon Adelson expressing his opposition to online gambling, Anthony Marnell III, joined the casino mogul on the anti-gambling lifeboat. Marnell, who stated his views did not reflect the feelings of the parent company, said that addiction and underage gaming are concerns that should not be ignored, and he doesn’t see a way to address them, thus online gaming should not take place. (The parent company, we imagine, is reserving judgment, as it tries to figure out how to ply online gamblers with lines of credit, comps, and alcohol in some kind of cyber-maze without clocks or sunlight.) Twitter was unkind to Mr. Marnell, with poker world responses from outraged (“I will never play at the M again”) to sarcastic (“Wait….there is a casino called “M Resort”?). In either case, instead of a unified industry identifying their shared interests and concerns, the casino operators and glad-handers are splintering like rival street gangs, protecting isolated “turf.” And while it’s too early to see if this has any real impact, with other companies like Caesars and MGM in favor of such regulation, it certainly isn’t a unified position either way.

Jonathan Duhamel’s Ex-girlfriend – At the end of 2011 Jonathan Duhamel was the victim of a home invasion in which he lost his 2010 WSOP bracelet, a Rolex watch, and thousands of Euros in cash. At first, this seemed like an unfortunate situation for the 2010 Main Event champion, but now we find out that this was (allegedly) the master plan of Duhamel’s ex-girlfriend, Bianca Rojas-Latraverse. According to a detective involved in the case (who had the fitting last name of Lapolice), Rojas-Latraverse had been planning for weeks to rob Duhamel and had things pretty well planned (except for succeeding, apparently). CTV reports that, as of Monday, January 9, Rojas-Latraverse and two others in connection with the crime – presumably with less Dickensian names – are still behind bars awaiting a bail ruling.

The only winners in this story are the countless mothers who have counseled their successful sons to “watch out for gold diggers.” This could have been a cautionary tale for poker pros to be careful about their associations, but at best it’s a warning to stay away from idiots, the kind who steal (and then wear) your personalized Rolex and take your only-one-in-existence 2010 WSOP Main Event bracelet.