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[toc]The week in gambling news featured a lot of big buy-ins and big paydays in the poker world as well as big possibilities in the legislative realm.
While poker players in Nevada and New Jersey dealt with cold, hard cash, lawmakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey looked at theoretical ways to bring in the dough.
Here are the major stories of this week in gambling.
High rollers descend on Las Vegas
One of the biggest High Roller events of the year is the $300,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bowl at Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The tournament opened up deposits to reserve one of the 35 available seats in the 50-seat tournament.
The turnout was great, with 50 players showing up at the casino or wiring deposits. With too many players and not enough seats, the casino opted to do a random drawing to select participants.
The full list of selected names is available on the event’s website.
One notable name who did not get selected is Daniel Negreanu. The outspoken poker pro is a spokesperson for event organizer Poker Central and one of the biggest names in the game. There is still a chance the property awards him one of the 15 seats the Aria controls doling out.
Big winners on PokerStars NJ
PokerStars in New Jersey has had some trouble meeting guarantees on its big series in 2016. So far the new year is a new story for the online poker site.
The site’s ten-event Winter Series met the guarantee on every single event, including the $75,000 guarantee $400 buy-in re-entry main event. The site actually easily sured the main event guarantee with a $102,000 prize pool.
All told, the site generated $366,000 in prize pools across the ten events. An influx of out-of-towners in the state for the popular Borgata Winter Poker Open series likely helped bolster participation.
The biggest winner of the week was the called VaderWolf. That player was the beneficiary of the grand prize of $100,000 in PokerStars’ Spin & Go promotion.
Since April of last year, the site has been looking for the first winner in the promotion, which is open to all $10 Spin & Go winners in the state.
New Jersey preps for possible gambling expansion
Meanwhile in the Garden State, a new bill is proposing an internet café of sorts in the state’s racetracks to offer a variation of online gambling.
Currently online casino and poker games are legal in New Jersey. The only site offering brick and mortar casinos is Atlantic City. This bill attempts to use the former to expand the latter to other parts of the state and give a revenue boost to the struggling race tracks.
Image credit: Kobby Dagan / Shutterstock, Inc.
