This week’s poker news kicks off in Italy where a global giant is looking to gain a foothold in the country. Then there is player news with one expanding its work in the game and another stepping away completely.
A poker giant has said "ciao" to Italy. 888Poker, the self-proclaimed second-biggest poker site in the world, has just gotten bigger. That’s because the Gibraltar-based company has launched in Italy.
888Poker already has sports betting and casino foundations in Italy, so it was only right that they bring in their poker for the cherry on the top. There will be two variations of their poker offerings: one is called SNAP Poker, which is a high-speed game with fast folds, and the other is Poker Blast, which is an eight-minute game that has a prize pool of up to $357,000. To make the announcement, the launch came with a new advertising campaign that stated, "Let the games begin!" in Italian.
Simon Deadman is a well-known player in poker circles who has registered many big wins in his career. Now he’d like to show others how to find that pot of gold.
Deadman, who now lives in Las Vegas, has decided to start giving lessons to those who want to get serious about the game of poker. He isn’t a cheap teacher as he charges $295 for one hour, $1,395 for five hours and $2,595 for 10 hours, along with a boot camp that costs $4,995. You’ll even get to stay with Deadman for two days in his house playing poker.
The Nottingham, England native has been quite successful, taking home over $2.8 million in his career. Some of his signature efforts were a second-place result in a World Series of Poker event in June 2015 to take home $391,446 and a fourth-place result in a European Poker Tour event to win $296,891 in December 2014. He won’t be quitting his playing career just yet as he finished in 23rd place in a PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament recently, winning $4,140.
Vanessa Selbst has had a very successful poker career but now she’s moving on to other endeavors. Selbst, who has a law degree from Yale, is retiring to move into a career working on a hedge fund. While that seems like a big change, one of the main reasons had been that poker started to feel too much like work for her, so she figured it was time to move in another direction.
She is the only woman to claim the top spot on the Global Poker Index and she has won over $11.8 million from live play. She has broken the million-dollar mark for winning three tournaments, and her high came in September 2010 when she took home over $1,823,430 for winning an event on the Partouche Poker Tour in France.
Selbst was a member of the PokerStars Team Pros and brought home $800,000 or more from 2010 and 2015. Those numbers dwindled over the last two years and that is likely what she meant when she said poker started to feel like work; she didn’t enjoy it as much.