The largest poker forums on the Internet, the TwoPlusTwo Forums, have been hacked. According to a message posted on the site, “[the hacker] has displayed the ability to access e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords. He also indicated the ability to decrypt passwords.”

Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Subject: Poker, has advised that people change their password on any sites where a password identical to their TwoPlusTwo one is used. It is currently impossible to change one’s TwoPlusTwo passwords as the forums have been temporarily shut down for security purposes.

Poker player Dale Phillips perhaps summed this situation up best in the below tweet:

11:01 am ET: In what would be a major development in the storied soap opera of Full Tilt Poker since Black Friday more than a year ago, it is presently being rumored that PokerStars has bought the beleaguered site for $750 million. The purchase would include enough to settle with the DOJ and reimburse all players.

At the time this was published, this possibility seems to be merely a rumor. However, the above-linked tweet by Alexandre Dreyfus was “retweeted” by leading poker media specialist Kevin Mathers which does seem to lend it some credence.

In a post on the Two Plus Two forums, moderator “Mike Haven” indicated a press release may be soon to follow. If the news is indeed true, it would mark an end to the much-awaited efforts by Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT) to purchase Full Tilt which have been ongoing since last September. Stay tuned for further updates.

11:39 am ET: This rumor appears to have more fuel behind it as iGaming France reports that, “Laurent Tapie confirms deal is off for FTP buyout, insinuates external sabotage over DOJ negociations [sic].”

Laurent Tapie is the figurehead of the French company GBT which had previously been working to buy Full Tilt. News that GBT has confirmed their efforts to buy Full Tilt Poker are over seems to bode very well for the rumors that PokerStars has acquired the site.

4:01 pm ET: In a statement on their official blog, PokerStars has failed to confirm the rumors at this time. Said Eric Hollreiser, Head of Corporate Communications for PokerStars, “We’ve had a lot of enquiries and there’s lots of speculation on the forums, so I wanted to address the PokerStars chatter. As you know, PokerStars is in settlement discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice. As such settlement discussions are always confidential, we are unable to comment on rumors. As soon as we have information to share publicly we will do so.”

After an ugly parting-of-ways with their in-house autotune specialist SrslySirius, the folks at QuadJacks.com have wasted little time replacing his talents. One day following the one year anniversary of Black Friday, they have released a new poker hip-hop video titled New Sunday. The track, which laments the loss of Americans’ ability to play online poker tournaments on Sundays, was created by DRybes and Sonny Caine. Have a listen:

There is still no news regarding the rumored sale of Full Tilt Poker to Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT). But there are new indications that the deal could be close to completion.

Multiple job listings were posted on jobs.ie, an Irish employment website earlier today. Ireland is the corporate headquarters of Pocket Kings Ltd., the marketing and customer service arm of Full Tilt Poker. The job descriptions are for experienced, multilingual customer service reps. The ad states, “With an attractive salary, these 2-3 month contract roles may become permanent and offer an exciting opportunity to join a vibrant and energetic company.” It continues, “Working in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, this area of the business provides potential for rapid growth within our company, which is the support arm for Full Tilt Poker.” Each of the job listings stress the urgent need to fill the positions.

These job listings were posted on the same day as news that a subsidiary company of Full Tilt Poker has applied for a gaming license with the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC). The company, Orinic Limited, was the only subsidiary of Full Tilt to escape having its license revoked last September. They are applying for a full category 2 license which would permit them to offer full online gaming services. Previously, the company held just a category 1 license which did not permit the handling of gambling funds.

It’s hard to say with complete certainty that these two news items indicate the deal between Full Tilt and GBT is imminent, but it certainly does appear to be a good sign following weeks of limited information. It would be surprising, however, if the AGCC granted the subsidiary company a full category 2 license without first ascertaining that the parent company has switched hands into new management. Therefore, one can’t help but question why the powers that be behind this deal did not opt to wait to submit a licensing request to AGCC under the new company’s brand after the deal is completed. Presently, it seems as though they are trying to backdoor a licensing upgrade through an existing subsidiary that likely would have had its license revoked had that license permitted them to offer full gaming services in the first place. It seems doubtful that this effort will be successful. But then again, this is all mere speculation on a topic that the poker world could not be receiving more limited information about.

One of the most triumphant creators of poker humor on the web, auto-tune and lyrical sensation SrslySirius, has recently had his integrity called into question by QuadJacks.com, a poker media outlet through which he was formerly affiliated.

The site released a statement today announcing that they are removing all videos created by SrslySirius from their website. Their reasoning for deleting SrslySirius’ portfolio of work which includes a poker rap making fun of Prahlad Friedman, a tribute song to Erik Seidel, and some much-needed Black Friday comic relief, were due to allegations that viewbotting had taken place on his latest video release Nightmare on My Street.

Viewbotting is the practice of intentionally spiking a video’s view-count on YouTube in order to fool the site into believing you have more viewers than you really do. The increased viewership is helpful for monetization purposes. More viewers means more ad revenue for the video’s creator. SrslySirius’ latest production, Nightmare on My Street, rose to over 1 million views in just two days. The video, which is anything but his best work, currently has 4.2 million views.

Said QuadJacks in their statement on the matter, “Viewbotting is an extremely unethical method of artificially inflating a video’s view count. It’s obviously a very dishonest thing to do, and it’s also a form of fraud.”

They elaborated on their reasoning for deleting the poker humor videos from their site in saying:

After having studied the situation thoroughly, QuadJacks is sufficiently confident that SrslySirius is in fact responsible for viewbotting in the case of Nightmare on My Street, which is something that genuinely shocks us and disturbs us. Given SrslySirius’s past working with us, it also implicates us. Did SrslySirius secretly viewbot on behalf of QuadJacks during his tenure? Not to our knowledge, and we have absolutely no reason to suspect this.

However, because we are unable to 100% guarantee this, and because of the controversy now linked to SrslySirius’s name, we have made the choice to eliminate all videos bearing his name.

SrslySirius is also being accused of copyright trolling. He allegedly filed a complaint with YouTube against QuadJacks stating that the site was hosting four videos on their channel which were his works. QuadJacks has stated that SrslySirius had no legitimate claim to these works as they were a collaborative effort by the site team to which SrslySirius belonged from May 2011 until February 2012.

This scandal is an unfortunate turn of events in what was once one of the most well-intentioned creative endeavors in the poker community.

Poker pro Terrence Chan‘s debut on the professional mixed martial arts (MMA) stage was a success. The limit hold’em specialist, known also by his online screenname ‘Unassigned’, beat Alex Lee in a second round submission as part of the recent Legends Fighting Championship (LFC) fight card. The LFC pools top MMA talent from around the Asia-Pacific region for competitions in Hong Kong.

Said Chan on Twitter after the win, “Thank you thank you thank you everyone! It was a super tough fight, so happy to get the win! Thank you all for the love and support!”

The 31 year old had tweeted hours before the fight that he felt, “calm, rested and peaceful.” Chan had just two weeks to prepare for the bout after receiving a late invite from LFC matchmaker Mike Haskamp.

Chan is known to the poker world for his track record in limit hold’em tournaments. In 2009, he won not one but two Spring Championships of Online Poker (SCOOP) titles in six-max limit hold’em tournaments in one night. Later that year, he won a WCOOP bracelet in a tournament of the same format. The Canadian also has over $900,000 in live tournament winnings according to the Hendon Mob database.

Bloomberg is reporting that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has refused to accept the prosecution’s plea agreement in the case of former SunFirst Bank official John Campos. Campos, a former part-owner and vice-chairman of the Utah bank, along with ten other men was indicted last April in the famed “Black Friday” case against online poker rooms.

The bank executive was indicted for several bank fraud and conspiracy related charges. Campos reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a misdemeanor banking charge. Judge Kaplan has refused to accept the plea agreement and asked prosecutors for a written explanation for why they are walking away from the case. Campos is the 6th person in the Black Friday indictments to have reached a plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Assistant U.S. Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown explained to the Associated Press that there are risks with taking the case to trial. He stated that Campos had been advised by experts in the gambling world that told him it was legal for his bank to process online gambling transactions.

Campos would face just a maximum of one year in prison if sentenced under the plea agreement. In the agreement, prosecutors call for a sentence of zero to six months. A June 27th sentencing date has been set during which Judge Kaplan will decide whether or not to accept the plea agreement.

There are two primary explanations why the DOJ has thus far taken it easy on Black Friday defendants. Most likely is that they are worried about losing the case should it go to trial and are thus willing to negotiate “slap on the wrist” plea deals to ensure a guilty conviction. It could also be possible that they are saving their resources and building allies for the targets they really want which are the owners and operators of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker.

There’s a popular stance in the poker world, usually taken among optimists campaigning in favor of the game’s legal status, is that poker is not gambling. This view, when stated as a simple matter of fact, is wrong. Making a blanket statement that poker is not gambling shows a bit of naivety for the reality of one specific form of poker: tournaments. Specifically, large-field multi-table tournaments. This is one form of poker that one sometimes has no choice but to call gambling.

I’m a tournament player. So I guess you could say I like to gamble. I’ve been playing multi-table tournaments for around eight years now. In that time, I have played my fair share of cash game hands along the way. But not too many. I don’t really like cash games. They’re a grind. One does not need a particularly large sample size, a few ten thousand hands will do, in order to justifiably say that their participation in poker cash games is not gambling. Because it’s really not. In the long run, and it doesn’t take that long to establish a “long run” in cash games, the players utilizing the best strategic approach will come out ahead. This is not as true for large-field multi-table tournaments.

In order for the variance of one’s participation in large-field multi-table tournaments to play itself out, they need to play a lot of tournaments. It takes literally years upon years of playing these tournaments to start to see the “long run” picture. For this reason, poker large-field multi-table tournaments (let’s say 1,000+ entrants) are more or less a form of gambling.

I enjoy playing the massive-field tournaments offered at PokerStars. I generally only play on Sundays as I am busy with other commitments the rest of the week and am less appealed by the smaller fields (and thus smaller prize pools). According to one stat-tracking website, the average field size of the tournaments I play is 4,500. That’s a lot of people.

Part of the appeal of these tournaments is the soft competition you’ll find in them. One weekly tournament at PokerStars, the ‘Sunday Storm’, an $11 buy-in with a $300,000 guaranteed prize pool (that’s at least 30,000 players every week), is delightfully soft. Probably only something like 1,500 or so of the participants in that tournament play it from start to finish without really making any type of a “significant” mistake. I like to think I am one of those people. That’s the objective of tournaments really: play solid, don’t screw up, and hope to be in the right place at the right time when other people punt away expected value. In the Sunday Storm, there are a lot of people punting away EV.

However, here is why the Sunday Storm is gambling and nothing else: even if I thought I would win it five times as often as an “average” participant would, that would still mean I will only win it once every 115 years! And that I assumes I play it every single Sunday. In other words, it’s safe to assume that I will never win that tournament in my lifetime even though I am much better than the average participant in the field and even if I played it every single Sunday for the rest of my life. It will take nanotechnology enabling me to live for hundreds of years in order for me to reasonably expect to win the Sunday Storm in my lifetime, and that assumes it holds a field-size of 30,000 players and never grows (and that bots never destroy online poker beyond repair which is another discussion altogether).

An unfortunate truth is that a very large part of one’s expected ROI in poker tournaments comes from outright winning them. Such a large percentage of the prize pool is awarded to a very small handful of players at the top, that anything short of a win is a failure in a certain sense. As PCA winner Galen Hall says, “you’ve got to win the games!”

I might have an expected return on investment (ROI) of around 200% in the Sunday Storm meaning I could expect my $11 investment to yield me a profit of $22 on average. If you’ve ever played the tournament, you would know that is not an unreasonable estimate for a capable player to make. But due to “long run” issues of large-field online tournaments such as these, that ROI will never be realized in a realistic amount of time. There is no long run. It’s just a gamble. Most people’s lifetime ROI in the Sunday Storm will hover around -100% to 100% while a few people will have an ROI of something absurd like 43,000% just from one fortuitous deep run.

This is the reality of large-field multi-table tournaments. Even if you play thousands of them a year (not easy to do), you’re still looking at upwards of a decade or more before you can expect the variance to begin to level out. As a result, this form of poker should be regarded as gambling. Humans do not have a long enough life span for everyone in the poker world to expect their variance in multi-table tournaments to even come remotely close to leveling out. A few players get most of the money while the rest are left with empty pockets on a gamble that didn’t pay off. And make no mistake about it, poker tournaments are, for all intents and purposes, just another form of gambling. But lest any Republican politician read this and use it as fuel to go on a self-righteous freedom-banning binge, it’s worth remembering that all of life is a gamble. In this crazy world, poker tournaments fit right in.

The trend of a new speculative news report in poker media regarding Full Tilt Poker’s sale to Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT) continues as PocketFives.com reports Laurent Tapie, managing director of GBT, has relocated to Dublin, home of Full Tilt headquarters, to oversee the acquisition and relaunch of the once second-largest online poker room. According to the article which sites an unnamed source, the acquisition is “a done deal” and “should be signed next week”.

It will be interesting to see if this latest update follows the months-long trend of news about the Full Tilt sale failing to come to fruition. Most recently, EGR Magazine reported that the deal would be finalized by the end of last week. This prediction proved false when that deadline was missed days ago.

In February, it appeared the deal was in jeopardy on news that former sponsored pros of the site owed $16.5 million in outstanding debts.

The poker world has continuously been left to scratch their heads throughout the lengthy negotiation between GBT and Full Tilt. Poker media outlets continue to make reports based on speculation passed down from unnamed sources. Although this onslaught of unreliable reporting has been frustrating, it does represent vastly more information regarding the sale of assets and repayment of players worldwide than has been offered from the Full Tilt Poker camp itself. It remains anyone’s guess as to if and when this deal will be completed as clearly little faith should be placed in the rumors and deadlines being distributed by various poker media outlets.

As the week reaches a conclusion, the poker world is left with more guessing and speculation regarding the Full Tilt Poker buyout by Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT). Last week, EGR Magazine reported that the buyout was expected to be completed by the end of this week. As of 7:00 p.m. ET on Friday, no news has surfaced of a finalized deal between the two parties. The EGR prediction was made based on talks with a GBT lawyer who said that although the March 16th deadline for finalizing a deal would pass, he still expected a deal to be completed by the end of the current week.

Poker pro Daniel Negreanu, who hasn’t kept his feelings about Full Tilt’s mismanagement quiet, recently said in an interview with PokerStrategy that, “The players are not getting paid. It’s over. It’s gone. Forget it. I’m telling you now. Tapie ain’t paying nobody. This deal is falling through. You lost your money. It’s just not gonna happen.”

The passing of this week without any news of a deal between the two parties gives Negreanu’s prediction some weight. But it’s really impossible to say what’s truly going on behind this fiasco as Full Tilt’s public statements have been infrequent and the word of GBT’s lawyers seems difficult to trust. It appears the poker world will continue being drug along with limited information until the next big update about the FTP/GBT deal which by now seem silly to place any faith in.