CardPlayer.com, Card Player College, and Some Winners

The Aviation Club in Paris, France, recently played host to the first World Poker Tour event of the fourth season. A total of 160 players entered the Grand Prix de Paris tournament, and the final six were Alan Goehring, Curt Kohlberg, Timothy Anders, Michael Zajdenberg, Juha Helppi, and Roland De Wolfe. De Wolfe ended up winning a little more than $600,000 and the trophy. Watch out for Juha this year. He is playing a good, aggressive game and is getting deep in big buy-in events.

Also taking place in Europe was the London Open. Iwan Jones was the winner, and he received the grand prize of $750,000. The story of the tournament was that Karina and Chip Jett both made the final table. The husband and wife team are now international superstars. Now maybe they can get back to writing their column!

As I mentioned in a previous column, CardPlayer.com did the final-table audio broadcast of the World Series of Poker championship. We are now releasing that audio in segments on CardPlayer.com. Be sure to check it out if you missed it the first time around. We recently decided that we will cover all of the World Poker Tour and World Series Circuit events this year that take place in the United States. Never again will you be without live coverage of the big events. At CardPlayer.com, we will bring you live play-by-play, chip counts, photos, and reports from all of these events. If you have any great ideas to help us improve on our tournament reporting, send an e-mail to tournaments@CardPlayer.com.

Each year, one can see the growth of poker by the number of entrants in The Bicycle Casino's Legends of Poker championship event. It is the first WPT event in the United States, and most events on the WPT follow its lead in terms of growth. There is now another determinant. The WSOP Circuit, which now has 13 events, starts in Tunica, Mississippi, in late August. The Circuit events didn't have the fields that people expected last year, but after airing on TV, I expect these events to increase at the same rate that we have seen in other events the past couple of years. I will report back in the next couple of issues on the field sizes of these events.

The school year is almost back in session. For all of you poker studs in college, we are coming out with Card Player College. Rich Belsky, who did our live video coverage during the WSOP, will be running our college edition. The goal of the magazine is to cover happenings around the campuses. There will be a lot of original content written by college students or recent grads that won't make it into Card Player, but you will be able to read it online if you are not in school. My favorite part of Card Player College, besides the girl of the month, is a column co-written by Scott Huff and Joe Stapleton. They both interned for us over the summer at the WSOP. Scott is now a staff writer for us, and we will get Joe when he isn't writing for Mad TV. Their columns will give you an inside look at what went on throughout the WSOP from their eyes. I think it is safe to say that their columns will be among the funniest you have ever read on poker.

Enjoy the rest of the summer!