This week’s poker news features a couple of stories from 888poker, including one player who made it to a World Series of Poker Europe event from a satellite. We’ll start off there as we do our tour of the poker headlines of the week.
Torres Takes WSOPE Main Event
The 2017 season for the World Series of Poker Europe came to an end with Marti Roca de Torres taking the No Limit Hold ’Em Main Event. The event, which is held at the King’s Casino in Rozvadov, Czech Republic, had a buy-in of $12,072. Roca De Torres actually got into the event by winning a satellite event on 888poker where the buy-in was just $256.
Roca De Torres won his WSOP bracelet by beating Gianluca Speranza in a heads-up battle that lasted for four hours. He ended up taking up $1,297,552 for first place while Speranza won $801,943 for second place. Mathjis Jonkers won $554,510 while Robert Bickley took home $389,879 and Niall Farrell rounded out the top five with $278,822.
Roca De Torres quit his job as an economics teacher to follow his poker dream and now he is the seventh Spanish poker player to win a WSOPE bracelet. He is also now 10th on the list in terms of money for Spanish players, but this is by far his best payday yet.
888poker Pulls In Saliba As Ambassador
Sticking with 888poker, they have added a new ambassador for their brand as Vivian Saliba has come on board. Saliba’s deal was announced at the King’s Casino. She will join the likes of Sofia Lovgren, Natalie Hoff and Kara Scott as other faces who represent the brand.
Saliba finished 11th at a $10,000 Pot Limit Omaha 8 Handed event in June and also won the 888Live London Women’s Event recently. As with most ambassadors, Saliba will be pushing to make 888poker a better place to play and will help grow the brand. She is already a fan of their buy-in organization, as well as the locations in which they have their tournaments. You can look forward to seeing Saliba at 888poker events very soon.
CoinPoker
Like it or not, cryptocurrencies are on the rise. Many sportsbooks and casinos now allow them as a form of deposit and withdrawal, and now there’s a new cryptocurrency-based casino on the market. CoinPoker has launched a cryptocurrency poker room and is now available for free play. Their mission is to provide players with transparency when it comes to their games as the details of the transactions will be saved on the blockchain. This type of cryptocurrency will also allow the transactions to take place in seconds instead of days, all over the world, and the games at CoinPoker will be used with Chips (CHP), which is a special type of cryptocurrency based on ethereum smart contracts.
CoinPoker will put their RNG (random number generator) on blockchain, which will be helpful in keeping cheating out of their games, which is something that has been hurting the online poker game in recent years. CoinPoker is all about fair play and they’re taking all the steps that they can to keep this out of their game.