Recently, we've been swamped with big tournament news and piles of news about recent online gaming legislation.
First, on the tournament front: The
World Series of Poker announced that the 38th-annual installment of the event will start on June 1, 2007. The final table of the $10,000 main event will take place on Tuesday, July 17, which is nearly a month earlier than the date of this year's final table. It is amazing what the
WSOP accomplished last year. The total tournament prize pools exceeded $171 million, and more than 48,000 players took a shot at poker greatness. Harrah's will release a more complete schedule soon, and
Card Player will post it in its entirety when available.
At the end of last month, the
World Poker Tour proved how popular it, and poker in general, is after the Fallsview Casino hosted the first-ever
WPT event in Canada, the
North American Poker Championship. With 497 players, it came down to five Canadian-born players and one American in a fight for the $1.3 million first-place prize. Tons of Canadian fans packed the house, many of whom waited hours for seats, and created a raucous atmosphere for Soren Turkewitsch's (an automobile factory employee from Ontario) big win.
Card Player will publish a full tournament report on this event in the next issue.
Now, on the legislation front: Representatives from more than 30 countries recently attended an online gambling summit in the United Kingdom, aimed at creating international standards for the regulation of the industry. These wise attempts at regulation, rather than prohibition, completely fly in the face of recent U.S. legislation that's aimed at banning online gambling.
The UK is by far the largest and most powerful country that plans to tax and regulate the online gambling industry. Plans call for the UK's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport to develop the framework by the latter part of 2007.
This is just another example of the fact that the U.S. is at odds with the rest of the world when it comes to the regulation of online gambling. The World Trade Organization has already ruled against the U.S. for its past heavy-handed laws. Antigua and Barbuda claimed that U.S. efforts prohibiting online gambling violated members' free-trade agreements. The WTO agreed, the U.S. ignored the ruling, and now these countries are gearing up for a second round of lawsuits.
With all of these developments, times are interesting. To keep up with all of the recent developments, continue to check out CardPlayer.com as our news team provides daily updates on this ever-changing legal landscape.
Now, let's get back to this issue. At
Card Player, naturally, we write a lot about the big tournaments and their winners. However, some of the game's most successful players make much more than the biggest WPT champs by crushing cash games. David Benyamine is one of the names at the top of the list. He has quickly become one of the most successful high-limit players in the world. In this issue, we bring you his story.
