From big wins to big deals, it was a newsworthy week in the world of poker. We’ll start our recap of the weekly news with a big win and end off with PokerStars’ investment into artificial intelligence.
Lunt Claims 888Live London Festival High Roller Event
Jamie Lunt of England stepped up to capture the 2017 888Live London Festival High Roller title as he defeated Jonathan Bowers at 6 a.m. on Day 2 of the event. The event, which had a buy-in of about US$2,900, brought in 69 players for a prize pool of about $181,500 in total. A deal was actually made between Lunt and Bowers, who ended up taking home more than Lunt, but Lunt got the trophy and still ended up with about $55,000. Bowers collected about $1,000 more. In third place was Ludovic Geilich, who was followed by Iaron Lightbourne, Oliver Price, Aymon Hata, Fabio Sperling and Giovanni Rizzo. It was Lunt’s first big win as a poker player, which is why he was happy to claim the trophy but the smaller prize.
New Jersey, Delaware And Nevada Strike Poker Deal
New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada have come to an agreement to work together and help boost their online poker profile. The three states will now have a shared player pool. This means that players from all three states can play in one another’s tournaments, which will result in larger prize pools for each event. This is a massive milestone for online poker in the United States as New Jersey has already seen a solid growth in its revenues from online gaming and by working with Delaware and Nevada, it should only go up. It also means that more operators should be looking to move into New Jersey, which is great for the players as that means more games and tournaments for them to choose from.
This should be enough incentive for other states to get in on the action as only Delaware, Nevada and New Jersey have legalized and regulated online gaming, but the rest of the United States is lagging behind. While we’ve seen names like New York and Pennsylvania bandied about, there really hasn’t been enough momentum to get it legalized. But as these three states continue to collect revenue, it won’t be long before the others jump in and get a piece of the pie they are currently missing out on.
PokerStars Incorporates Artificial Intelligence
PokerStars is looking to the future as they are trying to use artificial intelligence agents to do some research for them. These “agents” will learn how to play poker and other games and eventually help PokerStars come up with new games for their players to play. PokerStars is also thinking about using bots in their poker tutorials and for their players to use in an offline version of a game that they can play on their mobile devices. That way they can still have a connection to the customer even when the customer isn’t able to connect to the internet. This is a new foray as the poker world hasn’t been investing in artificial intelligence so much as yet. It’ll be interesting to see what actual benefits the customer gets from this partnership.