Change100 at PokerWorks

The world is so thick with poker news and gossip today we almost need our own tabloid…

The Poker Biz reported yesterday that Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker have dropped their entire stable of sponsored American poker pros. Antonio Esfandiari, Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, and Mark Seif were all given their walking papers, their estimated $500,000 a year endorsement contracts up in smoke. What would happen to UB’s Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke was less clear, but a visit to both sites reveals that all references to Duke, Hellmuth, photos of “Team UB,” Absolute’s weekly $1K heads-up matches with site pros for the TLB winners… everything related to them was gone. It seems to be a cover-their-ass move for the safety of these pros, all of whom live in the U.S. In light of the Neteller arrests, Absolute/UB wouldn’t want them getting pinched as an employee of a gaming site or anything like that.

Though wouldn’t that be kind of a treat? Seeing Phil Hellmuth hauled out of the WSOP in handcuffs? “They forgot one thing! I can dodge bullets, baby!”

Daniel Negreanu wrote a fun little not-so-blind-item blog yesterday alluding to the dispute between Phil Ivey and Ram Vaswani and Victor Ramdin over a seven-figure debt incurred over a series of high-stakes golf matches. According to Negreanu, Vaswani and Ramdin are allegedly refusing to pay the debt to Ivey by claiming that the stakes were never fair to begin with.

There’s even more salacious poker gossip in this post by Lou Krieger. Like, OMG, Dave and Rowena Colclough are splitsville because he caught her in bed with another man! Busted!

Pauly and Otis both posted terrific vignettes about their adventures covering the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo. Pauly plays some drunken late-night NLHE in Otis, Three Brits, and a Swede Walk into a Bar while Otis analyzes Gavin Griffin’s Million Dollar Hand and details his escape from France through the Italian border in Milan in Three Hours.

Hearty congratulations go out to the best poker photographer in the business, Flipchip, on winning a $1,500 WSOP seat in a freeroll at Sam’s Town! Couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

Finally, I was trying to fall asleep last night when I saw a TV ad for the long-delayed poker-themed feature film Lucky You starring Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore and Robert Duvall. This picture has abandoned at least four release dates going all the way back to late 2005. This means either (a) it stinks, (b) Warner Brothers didn’t have any idea how to market it or (c) both A and B. Either way, the ad I saw touted a May 4th release.

Do you know what else comes out on May 4th? A tiny little independent film called Spider Man 3.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized.