Home / Poker News February 2010 / Phil Ivey, TJ Cloutier’s bracelet and the Everleaf merger
Phil Ivey, TJ Cloutier’s bracelet and the Everleaf merger
Posted by: James Carter. - Mon, 2010-02-01 04:15
In the wake of the Aussie Millions, Phil Ivey has made it official that he was the best ever poker money earner. The community has long proclaimed him the best all round poker player ever, but until not so long ago, the all-time money list – which, given the nature of the game, speaks leaps and bounds about a player’s prowess at the green felt – was lead by PokerStars’ Daniel Negreanu. While the Canadian still leads the popularity list, Phil Ivey is the new top dog in the money department. His second place finish in the Aussie Millions’ $100K challenge was enough to propel him to the top of the list. The high buy-in poker tournament, which featured only 5 paying positions, gave Ivey a AUD 600,000 prize for his efforts.
While Ivey is equally successful at both live and
online poker, not all “name” players fare so well financially. For some of them, the going is tougher than ever and no one could tell you more about the hard times than
WSOP Main Event Champion TJ Cloutier. Things have taken such a bad turn for the 2005 champ that he had his bracelet pawned.
The pawn shop decided to sell it on ebay, but the appearance of such an exquisite and rare piece of jewelry immediately raised quite a few eyebrows, and the story made it to the front pages of several online poker news sites on short notice. The bracelet was eventually bought by Cake Poker. The site decided to have some fun with it, offering it as a one-day prize through their $10 dealer’s choice games, before returning it to its rightful owner, Cloutier himself.
In other online poker news: the Everleaf network and the Universal Poker Network (UPN) have decided to join forces and to combine player bases to give birth to a bigger, stronger and more potent poker network. Victory Poker will join the merger today, Feb 1st, to create a poker network the size of Betfair’s online poker operation. The two network’s registered players haven’t received notice of the merger yet.
In the meantime,
Doyle’s Room has set out under Pam Brunson’s supervision, to fill up its 6 remaining in-house pro spots and to get the Brunson 10’s act cleaned up. The site plans to have a full team of in-house professionals this year.
