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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.

The online poker room TitanPoker.com that is located on the iPoker Network recently won the Gambling Online Magazine award for best poker support. This is the third year in a row that Titan Poker has won this award.

Titan Poker is one of the leading poker rooms on the iPoker Network and they are very proud to say that they have managed to put a “personal touch” on the support that they offer their players.

Gambling Online Magazine has been handing out awards to the best casino and poker rooms for the last 8 years and since Gambling Online Magazine is the biggest and most read magazine in Europe it is a lot of prestige in winning an award like this.

Titan Poker has a very good reputation in the online poker industry and they have been working very hard to achieve this. The main reason to why they have become so popular is their amazing customer support that is available 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. You can always reach the Titan Poker support by either email or live chat.

As a VIP player at Titan Poker you will always have access to a dedicated support person, this is a very cool feature and many players like the fact that they have access to their very own support person. But even if you are not able to reach VIP status at Titan Poker you will always get great support in the regular live chat. After all, they have the awards to prove that they are the best when it comes to offering support for their poker players.

We are happy to let you know that the popular poker portal PokerBonusSource.com is now available in Russian.

So far only a couple of pages have been translated but according to our guy at PBS they are planning to create a full scale site in the Russian language.

As from now all Russian poker players out there will be able to read a full scale PokerStars review and get all the information about the Russian PokerStars marketing code in their native language.

This will hopefully be a nice contribution to the ever growing Russian poker community.

Asian Poker Tour has just gotten an extended permit and they will celebrate this by hosting a 12 day poker festival in Macau this August.

The hosts of the poker festival promise that there will be 24/7 access to poker with tournaments and juice cash games during the 12 day poker festival in Macau. The festival will start at the 12th of August and finish on the 23rd of August and it will be held at the Galaxy StarWorld Hotel and Casino in Macau. The main event is also going to be bigger than originally planned with 3 starting days and a TV broadcasted final table. The buy in for this tournament is going to be $4300 and you will be able qualify through satellites at your favorite online poker room.

You can qualify for the main event in satellites that are held at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Titan Poker, PartyPoker and Everest Poker and many others. All of the poker rooms on the iPoker and Microgaming Network will also be running satellite tournaments for this main event.

One of the best cash game players in the world, Phil Galfond (OMGClayAiken) is not only a professional when it comes to playing poker, but also when it comes to teaching poker to new players. This is why he has decided to launch a new poker strategy site called BlueFirePoker.com where both new players and the more experienced ones can come to learn the game of poker.

Galfond has been asked to join many of the poker training sites out there but he always turned them down and now it is obvious why he did so since he is launching his very own poker training site. Just a couple of days after Galfond announced the launch of BlueFirePoker.com a new press release was sent out stating that they had now teamed up with online poker site PKR.com. The deal they have with PKR.com is that they will provide strategy material to both PKR.com and PKR TV and in exchange they will be able to offer PKR players the opportunity to pay for their BlueFirePoker.com membership in the PKR Poker VIP Shop.

You can also get a $600 bonus at PKR when using the PKR Poker bonus code EASYPOKER600 when you create your account.

PokerRoom.com was founded in Sweden just before the big poker boom and it quickly grew and became the biggest poker room on the internet.

In December of 2005 the owners decided to sell PokerRoom.com together with the whole Ongame Network to the Austria based company bwin.com. Bwin.com bought PokerRoom.com together with the Ongame Network for the total sum of $500 Million. At the time of the deal PokerRoom.com was the biggest online poker room in the world (Yes, even bigger than PokerStars.com) and they had a lot of success in the North American countries.

Three years down the line it is a completely different story and bwin have now decided to close down PokerRoom.com and move all of the players over to bwin Poker. All PokerRoom.com players are offered a cash bonus for transferring their account over to bwin. The upside to this story is that enjoyed playing at PokerRoom.com will still have access to all the same features at bwin Poker as they are using the same poker platform.

All PokerRoom.com players are asked to log on to their player accounts for full instructions on how to move their player accounts over to bwin Poker.