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Once banned from PokerStars, Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo, is apparently back at the popular online poker room. A few years back, Bonomo was first exposed at PartyPoker for registering as many as six online poker accounts and registering all six names in the same tournament. Shortly after, PokerStars revealed that he had done the same on their site. Consequently, both big-name online poker sites restricted him from playing at their online poker rooms.

But Bonomo’s dishonesty was not all that it was cracked up to be. He’s actually a great poker player, both online and off, and has since worked hard to smooth over his bad reputation and show the poker community that he’s not such a bad guy. In the past three years, Bonomo has steered clear of any misconduct and focused on overcoming the stigma that was attached to his name and re-establishing his career in professional poker.

After his exclusion at PartyPoker and PokerStars, Bonomo turned his attention to live tournaments, many of which he has gone on to win or cash big. In 2007 he placed 4th at the WSOP $2,000 No-Limit event and 2nd in the $3,000 HORSE WSOP Circuit. He went on to place 2nd in the 2008 WSOP $5,000 Mixed Hold ‘em event and has been around the block, placing at other big events such as the WPT Doyle Brunson North American Poker Classic in 2007. Bodog Poker saw the potential in Bonomo as a poker player and eventually signed him as a Team Bodog Pro.

What makes it clear that Bonomo is that he started his poker career at the mere age of 16 after emerging from the strategy game, “Magic: The Gathering,” like many other professional poker players (e.g. David Williams). He placed 4th in the 2005 French Open at only 19 years of age and had made hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time he reached 21. By 23, he was poker millionaire. The irresponsible kid that once tried to cheat the online poker system has grown into a diligent and respectable professional, so much so that PokerStars saw fit to lift the ban on his online poker presence.

Even though the current recession is affecting the land based casinos it seems that the online poker rooms are not being affected, at least not in a negative way. According to the numbers at PokerScout.com online poker is continuing to grow by about 30% per year. Not all of the poker rooms on the internet are doing great though, there are a couple of big rooms that are starting to see their numbers drop but this is most probably not due to the recession.

The biggest poker room is still PokerStars who recently celebrated getting their 20th Millionth customer and they are growing more and more for each day. They are now also allowed to accept players coming from Italy on their Italian site PokerStars.it.

FullTilt Poker is the second largest poker room and they are also growing on a daily basis just like the Cake Poker Network and the Entraction Network. Entraction has grown a lot lately and this is mainly due to the fact that the poker rooms that were banned from the iPoker Network, NoIQPoker.com and CarlosPoker.com moved over to Entraction. Cake Poker is growing a lot since they have taken over all the poker rooms from the old Gold Chip Network that is no longer around. But it has to be said that Cake Poker are probably also growing due to the fact that they are offering some really innovative promotions with their Gold Card system at Cake Poker and Gold Chip Rewards.

On the losing side of things we find poker rooms like Bodog Poker, Everest Poker and Betfair Poker. Bodog Poker is the biggest loser on the list and this is probably due to the fact that they have been having a lot of problems paying their US customers as they have had their bank accounts in the US confiscated several times. It also didn’t help that they lost a law suit involving their domain name and had to change it from Bodog.com to NewBodog.com and finally to BodogLife.com which is their current name.

If you take a look at the list of winners from the last week FullTilt Poker is the biggest winner when it comes to player traffic. Last Sunday they broke their own record when they hit 18.565 players sitting at the cash game tables at the same time. Even the IPN Network (Boss Media) had a good week and managed to break their old record when they had 4509 players playing at the same time at the cash game tables.

It will be interesting to see if the recession will ever get to online poker or if it will keep on going strong. It has been a couple of years now that people have been saying that the interest for online poker will die out but it has yet to happen.

The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City are one of the casinos who have tried to install automatic poker tables for instead of running the traditional tables with a live dealer. The experiment was considered to be a failure so they are now throwing out these electronic tables and getting the old classic table back.

The new tables that were installed were completely automatic and no dealer was needed. A large screen in the middle of the table is showing the community cards and each of the players on the table have their own little screen where they can see their cards and check, raise or fold their hand.

The advantage with this new automatic poker system was that it would eliminate most kinds of cheating and also avoid dealer mistakes. The fact that it does not need a dealer is obviously a huge plus for the casino as they will save a lot of money from not having to pay any wages to people running the tables. On the downside though is the fact that you don’t really get the same feel for the game as you do when you have real cards and a live dealer. With the new automatic poker tables people just tend to sit down and stare at their screen and the social part of the game is nowhere to be found. Then there is obviously the problem with people thinking that the game is rigged since it is a machine dealing the cards instead of a person. There are a lot of people who think online poker is rigged and these people would most likely feel the same way about these automatic tables.

The Trump Plaza had 14 of these automatic poker tables and their hopes when they acquired the tables were that it would attract the younger audience. The younger audience was not so impressed with the new system though and the older clientele at the casinos were not happy with this change at all. A real dealer was considered to be a lot more personal and added the important social factor to the games creating a better atmosphere.

PokerStars.com has signed a long term contract with Peter Eastgate and Ivan Demidov which means that they are now officially a part of Team PokerStars. These are the two players who battled heads-up for the 2008 WSOP title.

Peter Eastgate and Ivan Demidov where amongst the final nine players that had to come back to play the televised final table of the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event. When it was time for the final table these two players were guaranteed to walk away with at least $990.670. These two players had stacks around $20 Million and were not going to be happy walking away with only $990K.

After a couple of hours of play there only two remaining players were Eastgate from Denmark and Demidov from Russia. After a long heads up battle it was Peter Eastgate who ended up winning the title and the first prize of over $9 Million. Demidov was awarded with $5.8 Million for his second place finish.

After this event took place we have seen a lot more of these players at the different poker tours and Peter Eastgate is also playing in the TV Show High Stakes Poker.

During all of the events these two players have been seen wearing the PokerStars.com logo but until now they have not had a real sponsorship contract.

Last week it was announced that PokerStars had negotiated a deal with the two players and that they were now a part of the prestigious Team PokerStars.

Andrew Feldman, a 21 year old paperboy from Watford has just signed a contract to join Team FullTilt Poker. Feldman have won over $4 million playing online poker at Full Tilt Poker.

About two weeks ago the British newspaper “The Sun” ran an article about Andrew Feldman who used to work as a paperboy in Watford but quit his job to pursue his carrier as a professional poker player. During the last 3 years he has gone from sitting at his parents house playing $1 Sit and Go’s to buying a flat worth $500.000 and a brand new sports car.

On top of all this he has now become a member of the ever growing Team FullTilt where he will team up with the likes of Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Phil Gordon and many others. With these other pro’s he will travel the world and play in the biggest poker tournaments wearing FullTilt Poker clothing.

PartyGaming has agreed to pay a $105 Million fine to the Department of Justice (DoJ) in order to avoid being prosecuted for having offered online gambling to American citizens. The fine is for the period before the UIGEA was put in place when PartyGaming were still active on the US gambling market.

When the UIGEA was passed PartyGaming decided to leave the US market and since then all of the games that PartyGaming are offering have been closed to US players. They are going to keep blocking the US and will not accept any customers from that part of the world, but after paying this fine they say that they are can now move on with their plans of buying other gambling portals.

The deal that was made with the DoJ is only valid for the company and not its founders. Anurag Dikshit is one of the four persons who founded PartyGaming and he has agreed to pay a $300 Million fine to the doJ. The other three founders are Russ De Leon, Ruth Parasol and Vikrant Bhargava has yet to agree to pay any fines so they are still risking prosecution in the USA.

Yesterday PartyGaming released their quarterly report that shows that the profit is down by 2% compared to the same quarter in 2008.

When the stock market closed yesterday the PartyGaming stock was up by 15.41% on the London Stock Exchange.

PKR.com is the most well known poker room that is offering a 3-D software. Last weekend they made an update to their software and they have now added Omaha Hi/Lo and a time bank amongst other things.

PKR Poker is offering a different kind of software to the one that the conventional online poker rooms have. When playing at PKR Poker you will be using a poker software that is in 100% 3-D and where every player at the table can be custom designed and make chip tricks and express emotions at the tables.

The PKR Poker client is frequently being updated and last weekend it was time for a new update where a couple of new features were added to make the game more enjoyable. You will now be able to play Omaha Hi/Lo since that game was added with this update, the game is available in both pot limit and fixed limit. This game was added to both cash games and Sit and Go tournaments and according to PKR.com they are also going to add a couple of Multi table Tournaments for this game.

The other poker games at PKR Poker have been updated with a couple of new functions. At all the tables you will now be able to use a time bank where you can request extra time at the tables if you are facing a difficult decision.

Another function that will make all you tournament players happy is that it will now be possible to skip the breaks when playing tournaments if all players agree to it. This means that if all players are ready to skip the break before a final table it will star immediately.

PKR.com also added that they have expanded their VIP Shop where you can use your PKR Points to buy items. You can now buy subscriptions to poker magazines and pay for a membership at the poker training site BlueFirePoker that PKR work together with.

Source: OnlinePokerNews.org

Raha-automaattiyhdistys (RAY) is a gambling company owned by the government in Finland. They have monopoly on slot machines and other casino games that are put out in night clubs in Finland. RAY also own and run the casino in Helsinki. They are now also planning to launch a Finnish online poker room to attract all the Finnish poker players to their brand.

RAY was founded in 1938 and they are the only gambling company who are licensed to run gambling operations in Finland. If a night club owner wants to open up a roulette table in their club they will need to go through RAY who will put the table in place and use their own employers to run it. They also offer slot machines to the night clubs and cut them in on a bit of the profit for being allowed to place them in the night clubs. The profit from these machines goes to charitable causes and some of the money is used to get help for problem gamblers.

The Finnish minister of culture and sports, Staffan Wallin, announced that RAY is going to launch their own online poker room within short. All the technical preparations have been made and they expect to be able to launch before the end of the year. The government of Finland will need to change the current law a bit before they are able to be able to fully launch and accept players.

Finland have around 120.000 online poker players so there is definitely a market for a new poker room but it will also be very hard to try to get customers since not many new poker rooms have had a lot of success after the poker boom 5 years ago. It will obviously be very hard for them to compete with poker rooms like PokerStars and FullTilt Poker.

Gus Hansen is also known as “The Great Dane” continues to climb on the list of the players who have won the most money during 2009. Last weekend he took on players like “durrrr” and “Ziigmund” at the high stakes cash game tables at Full Tilt Poker and it would prove impossible to win any of the bigger pots of the session against Gus Hansen.

When it was all said and done Gus left the table with a profit of over $1 Million and in total he has made a profit of over $4 Million during 2009.

At the same time as Gus is on a real hot streak Tom Dwan has hit a real cold streak and he is down over $3 Million for the year. He is also down in the poker challenge against Patrick Antonius where he will lose another $1.5 Million unless he manages to turn this bad streak around soon.