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I don’t play online casino games all that often due to the house edge that takes away all of the chances of making any money when playing games like online slots, video poker and blackjack. Even though the house edge when playing blackjack is minimal it’s still there and it will prevent you from making any money from it in the long run.

But when I logged on to my account at Rushmore Casino today I was pleasantly surprised to see that they are now offering live blackjack tournaments, something that I have been looking for but never found before. The blackjack tournaments at RushmoreOnline.com are hosted by Rushmore, that’s all. They don’t have any house edge as you are not playing against the dealer but rather against other players in the tournament. These tournaments are comparable to Sit and Go tournaments if you would put it in poker terms. You can play heads-up, single table tournaments or multi table tournaments depending on what you would prefer.

When you enter a blackjack tournament at Rushmore you will be participating in 10 hands of play, the player with the most money after those 10 hands is the winner and will take down the price pool of the tournament.

If you haven’t tried these tournaments yet then we really suggest you head over to the Rushmore Casino to try them out as they are very entertaining and profitable if you apply correct blackjack strategy.

PokerBonusSource.com have been offering information of poker bonuses and poker room promotions since early 2004. Since then the website has grown a lot and a number of new languages has been added to cater for the ever growing poker community. The latest addition at is the PokerBonusSource.com Latvia version and PokerBonusSource.com Czech Republic version that was added to the site just last week.

When adding new languages the people at PokerBonusSource are looking at what poker rooms are hot on that specific market and posts reviews on those poker rooms with detailed information about their poker bonuses and other cool promotions. In some cases they also offer special bonuses and freerolls that are only available to players signing up through their website.

The best poker room for players looking to players looking to play online poker in their own language is without a doubt PokerStars.com where you can set to software to a lot of languages that are not available at other poker rooms. At PokerBonusSource you can find a PokerStars Czech review and a PokerStars Latvian review that was just added together with the other language pages. In these reviews you will be able to read about all the promotions available at Pokerstars in your own language.

In the coming weeks we have been promised that another couple of languages are going to be added to the website, mainly Estonian and Lithuanian. Hopefully they will be up and running on the site sooner rather than later.

We will keep you updated on the progress.

“theASHMAN103” is the winner of the $25K Heads Up Championship that is held once a year at Full Tilt Poker. In the final he managed the beat David Benefield and cashed in the first prize of $551.250. There were a total of 63 players participating in this tournament from the start and a lot of these were really big names in the poker world.

The results of the 2009 $25K Heads-up Championship at Full Tilt Poker

1. theASHMAN103 $551.250
2. David Benefield $315.000
3. WinnerFish $165.375
4. Yogiblair $165.375
5. Past $94.500
6. Kadabra $94.500
7. IvanLendL $94.500
8. Vaga_Lion $94.500

The 3D online poker room PKR.com have just announced in a press release that they have made a deal with Bluff Media which entitles them to broadcast a live stream of the 2009 WSOP on their website. This deal was made with Bluff Media who has an exclusive deal with Harrah’s Entertainment.

At the same time a new 3D online casino has opened up their doors to the public after getting through their beta testing stage. At the Buzzluck Casino it is not only about gambling, it is also about entertaining the players.

Phil Hellmuth’s own book company are now releasing a book called “Deal Me In” which tells the story about 20 poker stars and their road to sucess. Amongst the people participating by telling their life story we find players like; Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey and Howard Lederer.

This book tells the story of how Phil Ivey went from a telphone marketer to becoming one of the best poker players in the world. Today he has generated over $10 Million in profit from poker tournaments alone, which means that you can surely add a couple of Millions to that figure if you include cash game winnings.

The book doesnt really follow any storyline and is just bringing up stories about 20 poker professionals and their road to fame and fortune.

The players participating in this book are; Peter Estgate, Allen Cunningham, Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, Scotty Nguyen, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Carlos Mortensen, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Tom Dwan, Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu, Annie Duke, Dave “Devilfish” Ulliot, Chad Brown, Annette Obrestad, Erik Seidel, Layne Flack, Jennifer Harman and Chau Giang.

After a really long heads-up marathon match Vanessa Rousso managed to win over the second place finisher Randy Dorfman in the EPT High Roller Championship. Vanessa, who is a Team PokerStars member and a GoDaddy Girl is sure take down some nice tournaments this year.

In the final hand Vanessa made a straight on the turn holding 67 and when the river gave Dorfan two pair the all-in situation was hard to avoid and Vanessa Rousso took down the tournament and the €570 000 first price.

When the tournament was down to three players there was a deal made on the final table which left the second and third place finisher with €420 000 and the winner would get an additional €150K.

Here are the final results from the 2009 EPT High Roller Championship:

1. Vanessa Rousso - €570.000
2. Randy Dorfman - €420.000
3. Tony G - €420.000
4. Florian Langmann - €188.000
5. David Eldar – 138.000
6. William Thorson - €99.000
7. Andrew Feldman - €79.000
8. David Steicke - €60.000

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.