The famous online commerce giant - Chinese corporation Alibaba (which, by the way, owns the popular on CIS territory web site Aliexpress), organizes its own poker tour with total prize fund of $7 million! The next stage is scheduled in Shanghai with no particular date disclosed yet.

We wrote about poker in China in September: payouts in iPhones and cash games being restricted so one could get in jail for participating in them; we also wrote of official tournaments there.

Everyone know Mike Sexton. He is World Poker Tour announcer for almost 15 years now, he’s Hall of famer of Poker and is one of the biggest ambassadors of the industry. But there is one problem: Mike wins big tournaments very rarely…

I think the last time @MikeSexton_WPT won a tournament it was for a million against me! Well, he just won another big one! Congrats Mike!

— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) November 18, 2016

As you might know, gambling is officially prohibited in China. It doesn’t stop poker enthusiast though. Just like in any other country where gambling is prohibited, the Chinese think of their own ways and tricks to bypass the law. Besides, donэt forget about many underground games around the country.

At the moment, official poker life in China is centered in Macao, and is quite poor in comparison with Vegas, for instance. This comparison isn’t correct even. Vegas is head and shoulders above Macao.

WPT and WSOP have already paid a visit to Eastern Europe. They were a success. West starts to realize it’s not just about finding treasure in Asia, something is out there In some European countries. Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan all have huge demand and growing passion towards poker.

Not so long ago Tbilisi hosted the first stage of WSOPC. American took home victory, Steve O’Dwyer was the best high roller. And there are reasons for that. But we’ll talk about it later.

World Series of Pokers wasn’t the first. Tbilisi hosted first stage of World Poker Tour National last year. It was a tremendous success. Looks like movement at WSOP started right after that series: it was a successful market so we should try something as well.

So again here we are with the hardest of tasks to define who the best players of the year were. We couldn’t do that with the great precision without gigabytes of statistics and army of specialists. So we’ve got some data to build an adequate rating of the best poker players of 2015.

Let’s use our logic. We’ll start with the definition of the term ‘best’. What does it take to be the best player? The biggest earner or the most frequent ITMer? Maybe the one who played the biggest number of tournaments or the biggest number of cash tables? What is the main criteria to define world best poker player?

Yeah, we have to forget about cash games, unfortunately. There are many top poker players playing cash only. But cash games always stay aside. Nobody knows who won the biggest money playing cash. No exact, no approximate figures. And we won’t try to think out all the numbers.

Official WSOP website gave us first info about the biggest poker event. Among major changes are Colossus II and reschedule of the Main Event. Also among news: the biggest WPT events finished including $100,000 Alpha8 and Five Diamond World Poker Classic.

So let’s start from the World Series, it would be a nice thing to do. Let us provide you with link to the official site. Here is what we see:

• World Series 2-16 is scheduled from May, 31 to July, 18.
• Main Event is scheduled July, 9-18.
• Collossus II guaranteed prize money is $1,000,000 now and total guaranteed prize fund is $7,000,000 (used to be $5 million).
• 100% in the schedule are the following events: Millionaire Maker, Monster Stack, Little One for ONE DROP, Seniors Event and Ladies Championship.

This is all relevant information. There are talks mostly about Collossus, this year tournament has the fans with mixed feelings: 22,374 buy-ins in the tournament with $565 buy-in and $11,187,000 prize money had only 638k for the winner…

Right before the start of Poker Festival in Prague where the best poker player in the world should compete, city authorities have made new amendments to the gambling laws and that have already led to the best city poker clubs to be closed, including Card Casino Prague. In the New Year situation might worsen….

European Union with its intolerance towards gambling came to Prague unexpectedly. Prague was different to Paris, Vienna, Oslo and other big cities in Europe. Serious changes are coming to Bratislava as well in the nearest future.

Major dissatisfaction cause not by the number of poker clubs but with everlasting slot machines halls, the number of which is overwhelming in the city. The issue is in these halls full of entertaining mechanisms. Local regional administration complain about gambling problems among locals.

Prague City Hall adopted an amendment on November. 26^th and it should come into legal force on January, 1^st 2016. But the process of cleaning has started in some places already. More than 200 slot halls are planned to be closed during the next year.

Inexpensive tournament series in various corners of our crazy planet – that’s the nearest future of poker. This summer there will take place $565 Colossus tournament with guaranteed $5,000,000 at WSOP, and just now Full Tilt Poker started sponsoring IPT.

For many years live poker was the rich and the daring’s lot. Even World Series is a striking example of it. For a long time there were no tournaments under $1,000 at WSOP schedule. Whoever heard of it: giving the bracelet for such nonsense!

So far many old-timers (hello, Mike Sexton!) are dissatisfied with the course World Series has taken. Their opinion, of course, can be understood. Even more: we really want to agree with it.

Hello again, Montenegro. We’ve seen each other already. Only now it’s Splendid Casino and new title -- World Poker Tour. From April, 3 till April, 12 there was a second stage of beloved by many players WPTN Montenegro.

It seems like yesterday we’ve written about RPT Montenegro, which was remembered because of Golden Girls and series of “problems”.

And once again Montenegro. This is this spring’s capital of European poker, and Russian as well. There is a lot of Russians at the stages in Montenegro.

Such giants as Dmitry Vitkind, Vasiliy Firsov, Gleb Kovtunov, Alexander Lahov, Sergei Rybachenko, Alexandr Dovzhenko, Nikolai “NikolasDLP” Prokhorsky and many others. Even EPT Malta champion Jean Montury came here.

Two significant tournaments have ended in the Las-Vegas – WPT: Five Diamond World Poker Classic and Alpha8. There were millions of dollars at stake at both tournaments and the number of the distinguished players went beyond the limit.

Perhaps we will start from $10,400 WPT Five Diamond. The most interesting six-day tournament would be most likely considered as High Roller tournament on the European land, but bets are always higher in Vegas.

Almost 600 people (586 to be exact) anted the required buy-in – that’s a new record! It has beaten the result from the previous year for approximately 150 buy-ins, where 449 registrations took place.

The third time at the WPT Main Event proved to be the charm for the 27-year-old Canadian professional. Darren Elias who had earned more than $3.3 million online won the first offline title in his career. And what title!

It all started in mid-September, the venue – Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, one of the most profitable gambling venues in Atlantic City: about 4,000 slot machines and a few hundred tables. The most significant stages of the World Poker Tour are regularly held here.

The English like nothing better than betting. Great Britain, and England in particular, is the kingdom of scratch cards and lottery tickets, the poker empire and the homeland for the most powerful bookmakers in the world.

About 150 casinos are scattered across the United Kingdom. A significant number of gambling venues are situated in London. Generally speaking, most people do not consider Britain as a single state, as well as the United States or India. That’s why we won’t cover the situation in the whole country; we would rather focus on the most developed and densely populated part of the UK – England.

It all started during World War II. The soldiers became addicted to the game that was similar to the modern bingo. The first casinos were opened in the 1960s, and the very first casino was situated in Wales.

In poker, like in the film industry, only stars enjoy all the attention. And what about the medium and low stakes first-class players? Kind of supporting actors. They are, perhaps, no worse, but their names are only mentioned in the credits.

Some users of the TwoPlusTwo forum became interested in this problem and paid attention to the stunning results of the American Joe McKeehan.