The champion of the most expensive tournament in Georgia history is… American Brian Senie ($85,800)… Highroller tournament was won by Steve O’Dwyer himself, one of the top players in the world. The list of those who travelled to Georgia also included: Daniel Cates, Dominik Panka, Konstantin Puchkov, Vitaliy Lunkin, Dzmitry Urbanovich and Peter Eastgate. The latter opened the series.

Debut of World Series of Poker in Tbilisi was a success. The proof of this fact is that guaranteed money were covered almost in every single event! Main Event had 395 entries registered with guaranteed prize fund exceeded by $90,000 making $390,000. The same story with all other events.

All the sevens rings found their owners, many of them just visited Georgia for a brief time. Meanwhile, about the guests. There were lots of good reviews and comments about local people and players. Famous Georgian hospitality and cordiality can’t stop surprising guests. It’s uneasy to get used to it. But we’ll come back to that.

On March, 3-9 in The Sports Palace of capital of Georgia, in the very heart of the city, a grand event will take place: World Series of Poker makes a first stop in Eastern Europe! PokerDiscover team made a special service package for our players and subscribers who decided to visit series.

WSOP took a step on lands of Eastern Europe for the first time in its history. This stage will go down in history. The most famous tournament series in the world took with itself not just many years of experience of such competition but $700,000 in guaranteed prize money, which is spread between twenty something events.

World Series tournaments have a different structure and many peculiarities. One of which is WSOP Circuit branded rings distribution with seven of the tournaments where you can win one at the Georgian stage.  This is some sort of equivalent to WSOP Golden Bracelets but on a smaller scale.

WSOPC Tbilisi Main Event with $1,100 buy-in champion and the best player of the series will go to Las Vegas to participate in the biggest event of the whole season – WSOP Global Casino Championship with $1,000,000 guaranteed.

The first stage of WSOP Circuit in Georgia with guaranteed prize pool of $700,000 scheduled to the beginning of March could have become a disaster or a tournament with gigantic overlays at least. Turned out that all the tournament winnings will be paid without 20% of income tax!..

First info about this enormous tax came from Adjarabet representative in the evening of January, 29^th:

“The situation with taxes is the following – 20% of income tax will be taken from those prize money owners during the payout”.

“It is required by Georgia law. We don’t take commission on this prize fund, like 3% to the stuff or anything else”

A real tropic storm started momentarily. Players were threatening with their fists and were telling they have given the tickets back or going to do that; they were telling all the reservations were cancelled and this entire situation looks like racketeering and stealing from them in the middle of the day.

People make lots of prop bets on winning a WSOP bracelet or multiple bracelets annually. Many of those bets remain out of public sight but some blow the general public’s minds. This one is a bet of latter category. Vanessa Selbst made a prop bet on $2 million for Dzmitry Urbanovich not being able to win three bracelets this summer!

The most interesting part of this prop bet is odds: 200 to 1. Urbanovich risks just $10,000! This is 0.5% of the sum the American puts in risk. In other words, had he been able to win three bracelets he’ll receive two million dollars.

That is in theory.

It is not very obvious in practice. Let’s figure can a professional player pull that trick.

In previous March Russian speaking player won four events at EPT Malta, including $25,000 High Roller. Those tournaments weren’t major – mainly with under a hundred participants. And there were less of them in comparison with World Series.

Extrapolation is a friend of statistician, economist, marketer and any other person who works with huge amounts of data. They are no numbers relevant to poker. Poker stands alone. And sometimes logic behind its development is very hard to get.

Extrapolation can be used to make a forecast of some events or trends. Everything is very chaotic in poker to make some scientific conclusions, however it is very interesting to speak about it.

We’ve already defined the best poker players of 2015, told of the most important events of 2015, it’s time to look into the future.

Other World

The world has changed. It is in human nature that he can’t see everything with an untired eye. There are always tons of factors separating him from the right conclusions. The oil is becoming cheaper with each and every day despite many countries were trying to make the most of it by selling and selling it over the years.

One just can’t change the way of thinking he got through the years momentarily.

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…

Loyalty of tax system in Russia is appreciated times and times better than those in Europe and the USA. World Series Main Event finalists paid on average 46% of their winnings to the state! The only one that came off clear is Pierre Neuville…

Winnings in Russia are paid according to standard income tax and there is certainly no mentioning of “professional poker players” in the law. As usual, it is very dark forest without trodden paths and foresters huts, speaking metaphorically – and there are just wild beasts and fallen pines on the way.

And this matter has been resolved on the West ages ago. And the result is in favor of state. Poker players in the ISA are forced to pay 50% from what they win. And since World Series finalists do live in America, they are no exception to this rule.

Let us take the winner Joe McKeehen, for example. Without taxes his winnings were $7,683,346, with them -- $4,297,394! We will save you time by making calculations – it is $3,073,240 to the Internal Revenue Service of the United States (basic income tax) and over $300,000 to the local authorities budgets of the state and the city of participant.

24-year-old professional player has started the play on the Final Table with the biggest chip advantage in the history of the World Series. It was total domination of Joe McKeehen over his opponents from the moment it all begun. The American has earned $7.7 and stood cool as a cucumber all the time.

26^th World Series has come to its end in the capital of poker games Las Vegas. It’s culminations was the final table of the Main Event which has started couple of days ago.

 “I still don’t fully realize what just happened, but soon the recognition will come, - McKeehen admitted right after the win. – I still have a lot of discussions to make with my family and friend, this is the most interesting part for me.”

In the first day of play on the final table, McKeehen has eliminated three players by himself. The second playing period when the field was just of three players and it was won by McKeehen. You can look at numbers of chip count to make the same conclusion:

The first day of WSOP Main Event Final Table is over; six players continue to fight for $7,683,346! Original chip leader Joe McKeehen has accumulated more chips and it looks like nobody is able to stop him.

Few month earlier Joe McKeehen have registered into the Main tournament of the year - WSOP Main Event 2015. As usual, we had to wait for the outcome for quite some time, but now this time has come.

Nine players are to fight for the most respected title in poker and a huge prize of almost $8 million on the bright shining blue and red arena.

To start with, let us remind you who’s fighting for all these trophies, anyone could forget about this right now.

As the level of competition is very high, you have to find edge by all means possible. It’s known for quite some time that many pro (and not only pro) players regularly use different kind of stimulators to enhance their game quality. Those substances often have serious side effects. But there is also a little group of natural additives and we’re going to talk about them now.

We are not going to write about preparation and substances which cause addiction, seriously affect on brain work and nervous system. This is no the way poker meant to be played and popularized.

We will not be recalling Stu Ungar, 70s and 80s when one could often see at the poker table (even at World Series!) a pack of amphetamines and something like Diazepamum. We will not be telling you the most widespread brands among the modern day online and live players of strong and prohibited preparations.

Do you need it? You don’t.

When emotions take control over mind, when steam boils within, when you want to punch that dummy across the table, it’s time for fists and threats. And that is poker. And if in our countries we’re not used to deal with that kind of problems like gentlemen, aboard everything’s way more civilized

Recently the biggest fight in the history of poker could have happened.

Seriously. Jokes aside.

Super high roller David “Doc” Sands challenged to fight Douglas Polk who also specializes on very expensive tournaments and nosebleed-cash.

You’ve been waiting for it, and here it is. World Series Final Table! This year there is too much tragedy in it. Canadian pro Daniel Negreanu took 11^th place in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker for the second time in his life. It’s such a hard thing to handle!

27 people have made it to the final day of summer part of WSOP. Russian Nikita Nikolaev and Ukrainian Dmitri Chop have stopped just outside TOP-50 so we were left to root for those who are somehow familiar to us.

And Daniel Negreanu seems to be the most famous and closest to us.

Tony is a legend. He is a gambler to the marrow of his bones. 50-year-old American has over 200 ITMs in different tournaments, but he only won three of them. He has been in the money for 70 times at the World Series and 12 times made it to Top-10… And NEVER to TOP-3… It seems that he is resisting his own well deserved long ago victories.

Tony Cousineau is from Florida, USA. He started to play poker late to today’s standards – he was over 30.

Long before that after graduation from college future poker record holder helped his family to manage billiard club. It was noisy, full of cigarette smoke and drunk people – Cousineau didn’t like it, he wasn’t going to do that on his own.

The big scandal rises around one of participants of heads-up tournament with buy-in of $10,000 at WSOP which takes place in Las Vegas these days. The Moldavian player Valeriu Coca is suspected of cheating by respected players. The investigation is on the way, the results are yet to be sounded.

The story began in Event #10: $10,000 Heads Up No-Limit Hold'em Championship. Moldavian Valeriu Coca took the 5^th place in it and stayed ahead of such dangerous opponents as Matt Marafioti, Pratyush Buddiga, Aaron Mermelstein, Connor Drinan, and Byron Kaverman.

Coca lost only to 51-year-old American Keith Lehr, future tournament champion.