UK & Ireland PokerNews Round-Up: Big Wins and Career Highs
It's that time of the week again, ladies and gentlemen. The time when we take a look at the most popular stories emanating from UK & Ireland PokerNews from the past week.
We'll kick off with all of the live poker news because there has been a fair bit on that front. UK & Ireland PokerNews started the week with a brace of reports on major live tournaments concluding.
The first of these was from Aspers Casino in Stratford, London, where the partypoker WPT National London Main Event took place. The £200 buy-in, £100,000 guaranteed accumulator event attracted a field of 567 players to the UK's original super casino. Over the course of three days — including three starting flights — that large crowd was whittled down to a single person, the champion. That champion was none other than Lubys Zanas who walked away with £21,500 and the winner's trophy for his efforts.
While Zanas was busy bossing the tables in London, Scotland's Colin Gillon was heading towards writing himself into the history books by becoming the first player to win two Main Events on the Genting Poker Series circuit.
Gillon won in Edinburgh in September 2015 and took down the £440 buy-in £100,000 guaranteed GPS Star City on Sunday, winning £26,150 after a three-way chop and claiming his second GPS title.
One of the most eagerly anticipated festivals in recent years is currently in full swing over in Irish capital city of Dublin. The UKIPT Dublin festival is playing out there for the fifth consecutive year, with its bigger brother, the European Poker Tour, returning to the Emerald Isle for the first time in since Season 4. The PokerNews Live Reporting team is on the ground for the biggest EPT events, while the UK & Ireland PokerNews team will have a full recap of the action from the UKIPT once its winner is decided.
A new addition to the UK live poker scene runs its first tournament this weekend in the seaside town of Brighton. The Unibet Poker 2016 UK Tour is a £220 buy-in affair that features a £40,000 guaranteed prize pool, a prize pool that should be blown out of the water.
To the land of online poker now and another great result for Leeds lad Jamie O'Connor who navigated his way to a fourth-place finish in the PokerStars Sunday Million. O'Connor has hit a purple patch of form of late and this latest big score, weighing in at $64,213.14, was by far the largest of his career.
That impressive result helped push O'Connor into the top 10 of the UK online poker rankings for the first time in his career, and also saw him enter the worldwide top 100 in 59th place.
Rounding up the round-up is a little business news for those of you who are that way inclined. Shares in the newly merged Paddy Power Betfair have fallen by 17 percent since Feb. 1, wiping off half-of-a-billion pounds from the company's value, while share in GVC Holdings, who purchased bwin.party, have been on a rollercoaster ride, something not helped by Norbert Teufelberger selling £2.25 million worth of then earlier this week.
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