Poker News

Online Poker News of the Year 2009

With 2009 finally coming to an end it’s time to look back on some of the good and bad memories of online poker over the course of the year. There is no doubt that there were some great memories, but at the same time there have been some bad memories which some people will remember for years. I obviously will have missed some major stories in this blog post, but these are the stories I ended up choosing. Remember that we’re only taking a look at the most memorable online poker news of this past year. Overall it was a great year for most online poker players and it should only get better this decade.

The biggest story of the year is obviously how Isildur1 managed to make such a huge impact on the entire online poker world. Most of us didn’t have the bankroll to play with him, but that didn’t stop thousands of online poker players from following his every move. He ended up busting his stack on Full Tilt Poker, but it was later determined he lost partly due to Brian Townsend data-mining hand histories. Townsend received a 30 day suspension from Full Tilt Pro status and Isildur1 is working on filing a complaint with Full Tilt Poker the last time we heard.

The high stakes action has been massive this past year throughout online poker rooms. Full Tilt Poker has most of the high stakes action running in their poker room and this year the action was very good. There were many records broken this year in the online poker world including the biggest pot in online poker history, which was a record broken multiple times this year alone. The high stakes action was fuelled by several young guns, but we expect it to slow down in 2010. With Isildur1 bust right now and Tom Dwan playing low limit games the high stakes action has already started to slow down.

Poker rooms were expected to slow down this year due to the economy and also because of certain laws. According to websites that track the traffic at online poker rooms the amount of online poker players this year actually grew at a fast pace. It seems that most of the traffic has begun funnelling to certain online poker rooms though. Poker Stars broke the record a couple times this year for having the most poker players online in the poker room at one time. There were signs that the economy affected the smaller poker rooms though as several poker rooms shut down which was completely unexpected. Pitbull Poker and EuroLinx were two of the bigger poker rooms that shut down and this definitely caused headaches for a lot of online poker players.

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