On today’s Daily Deal, PokerStars announces the Baltic Festival, the CEREUS Network regains its post in the top ten, the Brunson Beer Pong invitational is upon us, and we all celebrate the seventh anniversary of Chris Moneymaker’s historic win.
Hello, I’m Sean Gibson and welcome to the Daily Deal by Poker News Daily.
The PokerStars Baltic Festival will be held at the Olympic Casino at the Swissôtel in Tallinn, Estonia from June 16th to June 19th. While the Main Event starts on the sixteenth, the poker action gets going a day before with cash games and Sit-and-Gos, as well as a cocktail hour in the PokerStars lounge. Tallinn will also be the site of the European Poker Tour’s first stop. Tying both events together, PokerStars will give away an EPT Tallinn prize package to the player who survives the longest in the Baltic Festival Main Event while wearing a PokerStars logo.
Two weeks ago, the CEREUS Network dropped from sixth to ninth position on the list of the largest poker networks worldwide. According to PokerScout.com, CEREUS has just reclaimed its spot at number six, sending Everest Poker, the International Poker Network, and the Microgaming Network down one place.
PokerScout.com staff speculated: “A larger than usual bad beat jackpot may have contributed to the late-week climb.” This Monday, a CEREUS player spiked a bad beat payout of nearly sixty thousand dollars, and at the time of our taping, the CEREUS bad beat jackpot stands at nearly a hundred thousand dollars. In the past week CEREUS also fully implemented OpenSSL encryption, ensuring that hole cards, passwords, user names, and data are secure.
The third annual Brunson Beer Pong Invitational is coming up on Wednesday at Hogs and Heifers in Las Vegas. For those who forgot what beer pong was about, the top names in poker will be tossing ping pong balls into plastic cups partly filled with beer, and their opponents will have to drink up whenever a ball falls inside a cup. The event will be hosted by UB.com pro Phil Hellmuth and Absolute Poker diva Trishelle Cannatella. Last year, Dan “Wretchy” Martin and Peter “#1PEN” Neff bested Todd Brunson and Brett “gank” Jungblut in the finals. We can only wonder if Brunson and Jungblutt have been training to win this year.
In two thousand and three, a little-known Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker took down the World Series of Poker Main Event and forever changed poker. This week marks the seven-year anniversary of his win, and Moneymaker celebrated the occasion on the ESPN.com poker news show “Inside Deal”. When hosts Laura Lane and Bernard Lee asked Chris if he thought there was a way to repeat the “Moneymaker effect”, he said: “A woman winning the Main Event would do phenomenal things for the game. It would bring another boom and definitely spark a lot more interest.”
Since Moneymaker’s victory, there are six times as many entries into the Main Event, while total entries into WSOP tournaments have increased sevenfold.
Thanks for joining me on The Daily Deal. Don’t forget to visit PokerNewsDaily.com and be sure to follow us at Twitter.com/PokerNewsDaily for the latest in poker news. I’m Sean Gibson wishing you deep runs in your tournaments!