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Poker News Digest 9/3/2008 – 9/5/2008
By Dan
Published: Friday, September 05, 2008
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- PokerStars’ seventh annual World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) kicked off Friday with the first of thirty-three events, the $215 buy-in six-handed no-limit hold’em tournament. A gigantic field of 7,217 began play at 2:30pm ET, making the prize pool over $1.4 million. First place will win $212,179.81 and nobody at the final table will bow out with less than $23,686.20. All told, the 2008 WCOOP will hand out $30 million in guaranteed prize money, but if this first event is any indication, the total prize pool across all of the tournaments may easily eclipse that mark. Last year, PokerStars guaranteed $15,000,000 across twenty-three events, but the total prize pools soared to over $24,000,000. A player who goes by the screen name “ka$ino” won the Main Event and more than $1,378,330.50, the first prize to top the million dollar mark in WCOOP history.
- In other PokerStars news, the online poker room released its fully-functional Mac compatible software client this week. While a Mac client had been available to players, it was only a beta version and contained third-party applications. The full release is entirely self-contained. While the software was a long time in coming, PokerStars wanted to make sure it got everything right, including assuring that it was compatible with the Mac OS X 10.4.10 and later versions of the operating system. The company now joins Full Tilt Poker as the only two online poker rooms of any significance to have real, full blown Mac clients. Other sites, such as PokerRoom.com, Absolute Poker, Party Poker, and Paradise Poker have flash-based web clients, but not fully-functional downloadable versions of the software for Mac users.
- About a month ago, the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Susan Schwab, postponed a meeting to discuss America’s online gaming practices with the European Commission indefinitely, irritating the country’s trading partner across the Atlantic. That meeting appears to be back on, as the Commission is now scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., in September. The desire of the European Commission to meet with the USTR stems from a complaint to the Commission by the Remote Gambling Association (RGA), which feels that by effectively banning all European online gaming companies from doing business with U.S. customers, while at the same time allowing domestic internet gaming firms, namely horse racing sites, to continue to operate, the United States is engaging in unfair international trade practices. The RGA complaint was filed in December and an investigation began in March. If the Commission continues to feel that its concerns are not being properly addressed by the USTR, it may take its concerns to the World Trade Organization.
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