Year in Review: WSOP champion finally named

2008 WSOP Main Event Champion

This is the 11th in a 12-part series taking a month-by-month look at what happened with poker in 2008. The series will publish every other day until the end of the year, covering the major happenings from all corners of the poker industry.

This time around we take a look at poker in November.

Tournaments

EPT

The PokerStars.com European Poker Tour's first-ever stop in Hungary turned out to be golden for a player in his first-ever live tournament. Will Fry of the United Kingdom topped a sellout field of 531 players to earn a first-place prize worth €595,839.

The online cash-game player and former croupier from Wolverhampton said in his interview that he planned to pay off his mortgage before looking into what good he could do for charities alleviating poverty in the developing world.

The EPT returned to Poland for a second go-round in November as well. This time it was Joao Barbosa coming out on top to claim that honor, despite the presence of EPT powerhouses Arnaud Mattern and Dario Minieri.

"I played very tight when I was a short stack but I was capable of changing styles and I think some of the other players didn't realize that," Barbosa said in his interview. "I got away with a few bluffs before they realized I had changed my strategy."

WSOPC

A win on home turf for Billirakis.

While Hungary enjoyed its first major poker tournament, the Chicagoland area did the same. The World Series of Poker Circuit's newest stop at Horseshoe Hammond in northern Indiana saw a familiar face at the top of the payouts when Chicago native Steve "MrSmokey1" Billirakis added the championship ring to his burgeoning collection of poker jewelry.

The former youngest WSOP bracelet winner went wire-to-wire against the 165-player field, turning his Day 1 chip lead into a final-table win.

"Tom played perfect. I knew he was going to play perfect; I would never expect anything less," Billirakis said of heads-up opponent Thomas Koral in his winner interview. "That's what he's been doing the last four or five years; he's just playing tight, playing perfect and just minimizing his losses at all times. He's one of the greatest players in the world that no one's heard of."

Later in the month, the WSOPC landed in Lake Tahoe where Michael Binger finally claimed his first major title two years after finishing the WSOP Main Event in third place.

"I think I play a really good short-stack game. So I wasn't worried when I got short. I knew which hands to push with and when to reraise," Binger said in his winner interview. "You've got to play as well as you can and count on hopefully getting some luck, and I felt like both things happened. I was happy with the way I played."

LAPT San Jose

The second season of the Latin American Poker Tour got under way in San Jose, Costa Rica, in November, and for the first time an American claimed LAPT gold. Twenty-year-old cash-game player Ryan Fee of Philadelphia, Penn., came out on top of a field of 219 players to claim the first prize of $287,773.

"If someone would have given me my buy-in back to play my stack I would have gone to the beach," Fee told PokerListings in his interview. "I came here and I just wanted to chill but ... I had to sit at the same table all day long and I'd just had enough. I wanted to get out of there. Thank God that wasn't possible."

WSOP Main Event

They say records are meant to be broken. If so, Phil Hellmuth's fall from the perch of youngest player ever to win the WSOP Main Event was a long time coming.

Denmark's 22-year-old poker whiz Peter Eastgate put on a show for the thousands of poker fans who gathered at the Rio in Las Vegas to watch the November Nine duke it out for the second-largest prize in tournament poker history. He earned his place in the record books with a momentous heads-up win over up-and-coming Russian Ivan Demidov.

"I do not think I have realized yet what a big moment this is," Eastgate said. "It will come [in] the next days and weeks. I expect I will get emotional about it later. But not as much now."

The final table was the longest in the history of the $10,000 Main Event, clocking in at 15 hours and 39 minutes. That figure doesn't include the 117-day gap between Dean Hamrick's elimination in 10th place and the resumption of play in November.

The long-delayed finale of the Main Event was filmed by ESPN for poker's first-ever same-day television broadcast.

Strategy guru Daniel Skolovy was not a fan of the delay. The WSOP staff seemed to think the event went over well, though, especially since it showed there is room for innovation in the presentation of the game to the poker-hungry masses.

FTOPS X

You might think you're seeing double (or triple!) here, but trust us when we tell you we aren't repeating ourselves by saying that Full Tilt Poker hosted another iteration of the FTOPS in November.

FTOPS X saw 47,768 players turn up for the 25 events and $15 million in guaranteed prize money on the schedule.

Cliff "JohnnyBax" Josephy was the highest-profile winner, taking down Event 15 for a score worth $46,125. The biggest winner this time around was Va Shon "Julian Verse" Watkins, who claimed the Main Event title over a field of 5,225 players for a prize of $450,708.50.

WPT Foxwoods

A Little win.

One of the oldest tournaments in all of poker saw both the longest final table and longest heads-up match in WPT history this November. Professional player and Season 6 WPT Player of the Year Jonathan Little outlasted a stacked World Poker Finals TV table featuring the likes of Mike Matusow and David Pham before entering a match with online pro Jonathan Jaffe that saw the chip lead change hands nine times.

In his winner interview, Little acknowledged that the ending could have come out very differently given the length of his battle with Jaffe.

"In heads-up you're either going to be on the good side or the bad side," said Little. "In that last hand I could have easily had ace-ten and he had ace-queen ... you just got to hope you are on the right side of it."

Industry

UB-Absolute

The UltimateBet-Absolute Poker cheating scandal saga continued in November when Tokwiro Enterprises - the owner of both sites - reached a settlement with Excapsa Software, the former owners of UB.

Excapsa agreed to pay $15 million to Tokwiro, which would be used to repay UltimateBet players defrauded by cheating scams run by former WSOP Main Event champ Russ Hamilton.

Word of the scandals caused by cheating at UB and Absolute reached the American public in November as well, thanks to a piece aired on CBS News' weekly program 60 Minutes. The newsmagazine didn't add anything significant to the story that hadn't already been broken by poker journalists and bloggers months before, but it did bring the issue to the attention of hundreds of millions of Americans not into online poker.

The two poker rooms wrapped up November by finally launching their long-delayed CEREUS poker platform that merged the two sites' player bases.

Full Tilt Poker

No Full Tilt logo in site.

While its competitors settled some outstanding legal issues, Full Tilt Poker found itself in a lawsuit of its own. Less than a week after she was dropped by the popular online poker room, Clonie Gowen announced she was suing Full Tilt for $40 million over Breach of Contract, Unjust Enrichment, Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Breach of the Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, and Fraud.

Full Tilt's software provider, Tiltware LLC, stated that "all claims have no merit and there are many inaccuracies improperly and unlawfully asserted by Ms. Gowen within her frivolous complaint."

A slightly better piece of business for the room went over in November when Full Tilt signed a deal with the WPT to become its exclusive online poker sponsor on Fox Sports in the US and in Mexico.

Legal Issues

Kentucky saga continues

A Kentucky appeals court granted a stay in mid-November in the ongoing dispute between the state and 141 online gambling operators. The stay meant that the sites were not required to turn over their domain names to the Kentucky government on Nov. 17 as previously ordered by a Kentucky circuit court.

A hearing on a petition from iMEGA was scheduled for Dec. 12 before the same three-judge appellate panel that issued the stay.

In a potentially positive development for online gambling operators and players, the Kentucky attorney general requested that his name be removed from the case, which had originally been filed by a different government department.

UIGEA

After two years without clarification of its hazy statute, the UIGEA received a final rule from the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The long-overdue regulations were set to take effect on Jan. 19, 2009 - the final day of the administration of President George W. Bush.

In order to give the financial institutions time to implement the new due diligence requirements, compliance with the final rule is not required until Dec. 1, 2009.

The regulations still do nothing to clarify what constitutes "illegal" online gambling.

Related Articles:

• Year in Review: Tournaments galore
• Year in Review: WSOP returns to Europe
• Year in Review: Return to the norm in August
• Year in Review: July sees WSOP cliffhanger
• Year in Review: Pro victories mark 2008 WSOP
• Year in Review: Final-table delay confirmed
• Year in Review: Seidel finally wins WPT title
• Year in Review: Tourney, legal action heat up
• Year in Review: Ivey, Black rack up big wins
• Year in Review: ElkY pounds PCA in Jan.