Home / Poker News October 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – The October Nine Gearing Up for the Showdown
The Poker Grapevine – The October Nine Gearing Up for the Showdown
Posted by: Mark Baldwing - Wed, 2012-10-10 07:46
With the October Nine showdown looming on the horizon, it is time to take a look at how some of the contestants decided to spend the months running up to what will no doubt amount to the event with the biggest financial significance of their lives. With millions of dollars hanging in the balance, players have always tried to prepare to the best of their abilities for the
WSOP final table confrontation, ever since the November Nine was first introduced.
This year, it’s largely been the same thus far. Jesse Sylvia for instance, the official chip leader who will start the final table with almost twice as many chips as the second place man Andras Koroknai, hired Vanessa Selbst as his coach. Russell Thomas (4th in chips) took the idea one step further: he hired Jason Somerville as his coach and he filmed the entire process, compiling a sort of a documentary of his WSOP October Nine preparations, which he shared with the poker world. Thomas said the “documentary” was something on which he had spent more time than on anything else in his life.
In other news: Full Tilt Poker has picked up its operating license from the Isle of Man authorities and with that, it began actually planning out the upcoming launch and the events that would follow it. The FTOPS will be back apparently, with its 21st edition scheduled for the December 2 – December 16 time-frame. The FTOPS has obviously been a staple on Full Tilt’s schedule for years, and there isn’t any better way to announce to the world that things are back to normal indeed than to restore it to its former glory as soon as possible. The exact schedule of the FTOPS XXI is not currently known, but there will be a Main Event as well as the usual selection of side events, most probably featuring buy-ins similar to past FTOPS. The FTOPS XXI is likely to top the previous edition of the Series which ran shortly after Black Friday.
