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“durrrr” took back the lead in the “durrrr Challenge” this weekend. Between Friday and Saturday he lost the lead to Patrick Antonius but the day after he was back in the lead again.

This weekend Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Patrick Antonius managed to play 1000 hands in the famous “durrrr Challenge” that will last for 50.000 hands.

In total they have now played around 6000 hands of poker and Tom “durrrr” Dwan is in a small lead at the moment. In total Dwan have won 3208 hands and made a $15.258 profit so far into the Challenge.
The match has been going on for 18 hours and 35 minutes and during this time frame they have managed to have a turnover of over $33 Million over the 6000 hands played.

LockPoker.com that is located at the Cake Poker Network has announced in a press release that they are now offering a Mac friendly version of their poker client. This means that they are joining a growing number of Mac Poker Sites.

The Mac version of Lock Poker has all of the functions that can be found in the regular PC friendly version. You can play with either real money or you will be able to play at the play money tables if you are just interested in testing the new software before making a deposit. You will be able to use the chat features just like in a normal poker room but the best feature is probably that you can adjust the table size which is really great if you are playing more than one table at a time.

According to the poker players that have tried out this new Macintosh friendly software on the Cake Poker Network have reported that they feel it is faster and more stable now that they don’t have to use an emulator from a third party to play poker on their Mac.

In order to be able to play at LockPoker using a Mac you will need an Intel Processor and Mac OS X 10.5 or a later version.

Hopefully it will not be long before other poker rooms on the Cake Poker Network also gets this Mac friendly version of their poker software.

PokerStars have just announced that they will be opening a land based poker room at the Grand Lisboa Casino in Macau. The poker room is going to be the biggest one in Asia with 22 tables that will be open 24/7.

Macau is an island in the Southern parts of China. The economy of the island is based mostly on gambling and casino businesses and their aim is to become the Las Vegas of Asia.

Grand Lisboa is a recently built sky scraper with hotels, restaurants and casinos. On the second floor of this building is where PokerStars are now going to open their brand new poker room where the main game will be Texas Holdem.

According to a PokerStars representative there are going to be play money tables for those players who are new to the game and wants to learn before trying to play at the real money tables. The cash game table limits are starting from $10/$20 (Hong Kong Dollars) and later on they are going to add high stakes table with deep stack play for the more experienced players.

PokerStars have also promised that they will start arranging a lot of poker tournaments in their new poker room, they will offer anything from freerolls to high buy in tournaments. In this poker room they will also host a series of qualifiers to the Asia Pacific Poker Tour.

The fact that PokerStars are opening a poker room in Macau will have to mean that they are trying to reach the Asian market and get the Asian people to discover the game of poker. It is safe to assume that they are opening this land based poker room in order to attract Asian poker players to the online poker room which is PokerStars.com.

Between the 17th and 20th of March the Latin America Poker Tour (LAPT) which is hosted by the online poker room PokerStars.com will be held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. The Main Event is expected to attract over 300 players. The buy in for the main event is $3500 + $200. Amongst the players that have already signed up for this tournament is Humberto Brenes, Greg Raymer and Victor Ramdin, all of these players are members of the prestigious Team PokerStars.

Victor Ramdin is also one of the 9 players that are going to fight for the title in LAPT Nuevo Vallarta which was played in Mexico during the month of December back in 2008. The game was interrupted by local police and had to be postponed to a later date.

The players that were remaining in the tournament got their prize money paid out according to their chip stack and they also got an invitation to an online tournament where the winner would be decided.

It is this online tournament that is now down to the final 9 players and instead of having the final table played online PokerStars sent all of the remaining players to Punta del Este to play live.

All types of lotteries and other types of games that can be considered gambling on the internet are suggested to be illegal in Philippines. Internet should not be used to spend money on online gambling or to accept players wanting to put money into gambling accounts according to a politician in the Philippines. Obviously there will be exceptions made for the lotteries that are arranged by the government of the Philippines, so this will become a monopoly of some sort.

The bill to outlaw online gambling in the Philippines is presented by politician Narciso Santiago and it seems like he has taken lot of inspiration from the infamous Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) that was put in place in the US back in 2006. Santiago is saying that there is a huge risk that children will start gambling on the internet if online gambling would remain legal. He also added that the fact that online casinos and online poker rooms could easily be used for money laundering is a big problem for the Philippines.

Exceptions will be made for gambling on horses if the race book taking the bets has a license. The Philippines Charity Sweepstakes Office which is a lottery run by the government will also be able to run business as usual. A lot of the critics are saying that it is ridiculous to make an exception for the government run lottery and that the same rules should apply to everyone.

The punishment for breaking the law and accepting a wager will be a fine equivalent to the amount that was accepted as a wager no matter the amount. This means that it would be pretty expensive for an online poker room to break this law if every pot played would be considered a wager placed.

Between the 23rd and 28th of March PokerStars is arranging something known as the All Star Week. During this week all of the “All Star Challengers” who consists of VIP players, Event winners and tournament qualifiers will challenge Team PokerStars professionals in a series of heads-up matches.

For every match that is won by an All Star Challenger the player will be awarded with $1000 and the same amount of money will go towards a common prize pool for the team to share. But if a Team PokerStars player should be victorious in one of these matches the $1000 will go to a charitable organization of Victor Ramdin’s choice. Victor Ramdin gets to pick the charitable cause as he is acting as the Captain for Team PokerStars.com.

In order to be able to participate in the All Star Challengers team you will have to achieved one of the following things during 2008:

• Have won the PokerStars Sunday Million
• Reached a final table in WCOOP
• Finished at the top of the PokerStars Tournament Ranking.
• Have reached SuperNova Elite

If you haven’t done any of these things during 2008 there is one last option for those of you looking to qualify for the All Star Team. You will be able to play your way into the team by winning a wild card in one of the satellites that are running for the All Star Week. The buy in for these satellites is $11 and you will find it in the tournament lobby at PokerStars under the satellite tab.

PokerStars will also add a supporter tournament to the mix where you can register as a supporter for either team. For every victory that your supporting team takes down there will be $1000 added to a tournament prize pool for a tournament that will only be open for the supporting members of that team.

Today is the start of the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star tournament that will last until the 20th of March. This tournament is held in San Jose and has a buy in of $10.000 with the number of entrants being capped at 400. In the starting field we will find players like Allen Cunningham, Freddy Deeb, Erick Lindgren and John Juanda.

Last time this tournament was held was a year ago and that time it was Brandon Cantu from the US who took down the first price of $1 Million. At the final table he had to beat players like Steve Sung, Jennifer Harman and John Phan.

It will be interesting to see who will walk away with the first price this year.

Last week PartyGaming gave made their results for 2008 public to all its shareholders. The numbers are showing that the companies profit from PartyPoker.com has gone down a bit compared to 2007. In 2007 PartyPoker.com made a profit of $295 Million and in 2008 it went down to $274 Million.

The casino side of things are going better than before however and PartyCasino.com made a $176 profit in 2008 compared to the $144 Million profit that was made in 2007.

The bingo part of the PartyGaming Empire is also growing as the profit for the year for PartyBingo.com was $4.5 Million compared to $2.5 Million in 2007.

The total profit for the PartyGaming as a whole came up to a whopping $472.9 Million which means that they will make a profit of $77.8 for 2008 after all taxes and other expenses has been taken out of the equation.

PartyPoker.com used to be the largest online poker room in the world before the UIGEA hit back in 2006. During the first 6 months in 2006 PartyGaming made a profit of $259.2 Million but after the UIGEA was set into place both the profit and the shares plummeted.

Hac Dang, or trex313 as he is known as at the FullTilt Poker tables have started of the year in an amazing way winning $4 Million in the first 3 months of the year. Trex313 has been dominating the high stakes tables at FullTilt Poker this year and no matter who he is up against he walks away as the huge winner.

During the starting months of the year there has been a lot of action at the Full Tilt Poker high stakes tables. A couple of players have been winning Millions while other has lost Millions. In other words it’s business as usual at FullTilt.

One of the biggest wins during one day of play was made by Sami “LarzLuzak” Kelopuro when he won over $1.5 Million during just one day.

A couple of days later it was Phil Ivey who crushed his opponents at the Omaha and Mixed tables at FullTilt. During the evening he took on players like “durrrr”, “LarzLuzak” and “Ziigmund”. After a couple of hours of play he left the tables with a nice $1.2 Million profit.

Even though these players have been making some good profit playing online poker it is still “trex313” who has been the big winner at FullTilt this year with his amazing $4 Million profit. It is obvious that this player is not scared of anyone at the poker tables as he has been playing against the likes of Phil Ivey, Patrick Antonius, durrrr, Ziigmund and LarzLuzak.

Hac Dang is the brother of Di Dang who is a well respected online poker player. Di Dang is more known under his online poker alias which is “Urindanger”. Over the last couple of years the two brother have won over $10 Million playing at FullTilt Poker.

For those of you who are planning to play in this year’s Word Series of Poker we can tell you that the starting stacks in the 2009 WSOP are going to be $30.000 instead of $20.000 like last year and $10.000 as it has been the years before that.

The people responsible for WSOP have listened to the professional poker players when they have told them that they want a slower structure. The buy in for the Main Event will still be $10.000 like every other year but the starting stack is now $30.000 and at the same time the levels will be 120 minutes. This change is made so that the players will be able to play with deeper stacks towards the end instead of a lot of players at the final table being short stacked.

Jack Effel, who is the Tournament Director of the WSOP had the following to say about the recent rule changes: “We have tripled the amount of starting chips in every WSOP event that will be held in 2009. Now some of you might say; ‘then you have probably removed some levels instead’, but it’s actually the other way around, we have added more levels instead. The world economy is not looking good right now and we would like to make sure that the poker players who come here will get as much value out of the tournaments as possible.”

This means that it’s not only in the Main Event that you will get a larger starting stack, this goes for all the other events as well which is really a great move by the people in charge of WSOP. This will result in a higher quality of the game and it will give even more status to the winner as there will be more skilled involved when the stacks are deeper.