Poker tournaments worth throwing some elbows to get into.

Cake Poker is rolling out some ultra-high value poker tournaments called Door Crashers between May 1 and 15.

Door Crashers are not technically scheduled for any specific time, but they will pop up between the hours of 12 – 2 PM and 9 – 11 PM ET everyday of the promotion. They will all have limited seating and will only have 10 minutes time from when they are announced to when they begin.

The Door Crasher poker tournaments will vary in value from good to amazing, all buy-ins will range from one Gold Chip to $30 and seating will always be limited. So remember poker people, you won’t want to waste anytime when you see a Door Crasher pop-up because they will fill-up fast.

If you haven’t already, you can download the Cake Poker free poker software. And don’t forget, new sign-ups get a 110% deposit bonus.

The cream of the online poker tournament crop is this Sunday.

It can earn you points towards Card Player’s Online Player of the Year Award. It can earn you the respect of your online poker peers. But most importantly, it can earn you big fat gobs of cash.

That’s right it’s that time of the month again. No, not THAT time of the month. The Cake Poker $250K Guaranteed Tournament time of the month.

If you’re looking for a seat to this premiere online poker tournament there are plenty of ways to get in from $3 satellites, Gold Chip satellites, direct Gold Chip buy-ins and direct cash buy-ins for $268.

This month has a good chance of seeing some overlay so that means a good deal for poker players looking for high value.

If you haven’t already you can get Cake’s free poker download and start off right with a 110% deposit bonus.

Cake Poker’s DANCER $3K freeroll runs tonight. Get the password below. (Cake Poker Image)

Cake Poker’s Reindeer Games tournament series definitely have the spirit of the season as they continue to give back to the ones we love, online poker players. Bless their hearts.

Seriously though, by way of example, last night’s BLITZEN tournament offered unbridled value as 80 players competed for a prize pool that paid out the top 10 with the first place winner, Grind2KiLL won an $8,000 prize package – a pair of Super Bowl tickets plus $1400 cash. Boo ya!

Tonight the DANCER freeroll runs at 6pm ET and registration is currently open so go ahead and get your piece. Although you will need the password. Oh you want to know what it is? OK, it’s RUDY.

You can find the DANCER tournament listed under the Private tab in your Cake Poker software. If you haven’t already, this might be a good time to join Cake and download their free online poker software. Good luck in the Dancer freeroll and be sure to check out Cake Poker’s compete Reindeer Games tournament schedule. Because they don’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice, they just want you to enjoy the great value they’re offering over the holidays. Enjoy!

He's one of the most feared poker players in the world. His mix of aggression and randomness give players fits as they try to figure out whether he's three-betting with pocket Kings or 7-2 offsuit. And his lifetime tournament winnings - $7.4 million and counting - prove he's truly one of the great ones. And yet Gus Hansen is currently in the middle of a startling $6 million dollar down-swing since the start of the year.

Poker being poker, a player's fortunes do tend to rise and fall with seeming randomness. Even the most skilled players can suffer through runs of bad cards, bad reads or just plain bad beats. But the extended run of losing for Hansen seems to indicate something else is afoot. And given that most of his losses come playing online poker, some have hinted that it's his online strategy that's losing him money.

Back in March of this year, this conversation wouldn't be happening. He was up over $3 million, mostly through playing high-limit Pot Limit and Mixed Limit Omaha. But that's when the great Dane's leash started feeling a little tighter. By October, that $3 million up turned into $3 million down, representing a swing of $6 million bucks. Opponents started flocking to any table where he was playing, and some started questioning his strategy.

He got attention, and not good attention, for his habit of buying in at a relatively low amount - well, low for the high-stakes tables he was frequenting - then waiting for good cards and pushing all-in. No bluffing, no subtlety, just standard short-stack desperation poker. And for those who have enjoyed watching Hansen play over the years, that seems like a strange tactic for the skilled player.

Only time will tell if Hansen will turn things around in his online game, and whether his lack of success will start to bleed over into his live tournament play. It hasn't been a great year for him there either, with only a couple of low six-figure winnings in 2009. That's pretty good for most players, but not for someone with Hansen's skill and savvy.

With most of the US sleeping off their turkey and gravy hangovers this morning, there's not a whole lot of exciting news from the world of poker. But, when all else fails we can always look to last night's high-stakes online poker action for entertainment, especially when Isildur1 is at the tables.

The mysterious Swedish dynamo was back at it again, unfettered by the kind of swings that would put any regular player off poker for life. In the last two weeks he's been on both the losing and winning side of a world record-setting pot, and has ended most of his sessions up or down over a million dollars. And last night was no different.

After a short but sweet multi-player $300/$600 Pot Limit Omaha session, Isildur1 was up a paltry $392 grand. Wanting to step up the action, he sat down with Tom "durrrr" Dwan for some more PLO, but heads-up this time. Why Dwan continues to agree to these games is a mystery, as Isildur1 seems to destroy him every time, including last night. When durrrr finally stumbled off to bed, Isildur1 had $665,000 of his money.

Next up, Isildur1 took somewhere around $1.5 million from his frequent nemesis Patrik Antonius. He would have been smart to take his $2.5 million in proceeds for the evening and retire for the night. But in one last match up, he played a session against a player called Ziigmund, and lost $1.4 million in just a couple hours. Easy come, easy go for Isildur1.

This past Sunday, a player called "docsonfile" won almost $30K by taking down the $100K Sunday guaranteed tournament at Cake. I checked in with him and he was kind enough to let us "out" him. His name is Justin Iovanne and he's been a professional poker player for about four years now, mostly online. Adding $30K to his bankroll will help him maintain that extremely enviable lifestyle of not having a real j*b.

I also had to ask Justin about the somewhat unusual nickname "docsonfile". "Inside joke at 2+2..." he explained. Hmmm. Color us intrigued. If you know the origin of the name, please put a comment here and we'll ship you a nice Cake baseball hat.

Now, you'll notice that the title says it was the last Sunday $100K guaranteed tournament at Cake. That's true - because of you, the Cake players. You've been blowing out the guarantee, so we're responding by saying "Great - guarantee going up."

Check it out:

Since this coming Sunday is the last Sunday of the month, it's our $250K guarantee, and the entries are already piling up in it - look for a very big prize pool. And then after that, we're guaranteeing $125K in the prize pool, so come on out and get a slice of the new bigger Cake.

When most poker players settle down for some online action, they sit down at a single cash table or enter one tournament at a time. There's also a sizeable minority who play two or three or five tables at once, satisfying their ADD and love of the game at the same time. And then there's the Russian online player who recently set a world record by playing the most hands ever within a 24 hour period. Over the course of 18 hours and 33 minutes, "innerspy" played 40,088 hands of online poker.

To put that in perspective, the average online poker game features somewhere around thirty hands per hour. At that rate, you'd have to play for 55 days, grinding it out twenty-four hours a day. Obviously "innerspy" played a whole lot of tables at once, and kept his bathroom breaks to a minimum.

The twenty-two year old poker pro was inspired to set the new record by an anonymous challenge issued on a Russian poker forum. Until he sat down to take on the challenge Saturday morning, he'd never played more than a paltry 20,000 hands in a day.

Of course there's one question that wasn't answered in any of the stories about this amazing feat - was he up or down at the end of the day? Because sure, playing 40,088 hands in one day is impressive. But playing 40,088 hands and turning a profit? That's something to really brag about.

For the last couple of weeks, the online poker world has been abuzz with the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious Swedish poker player with the handle Isuldur1. He's been on a roller-coaster, winning and losing more than most of us will earn in twenty years. Last week, he was on the wrong end of the largest pot in online poker history, losing almost $900,000 on a single hand. Well, that ain't nothing.

This weekend, Isuldur1 was again going heads-up against Patrik Antonius. And again, they played the largest pot in online poker history, this time, a staggering $1,356.947. And again, Isuldur1 lost. Unfortunately for him, that wasn't even the extent of the damage.

Over the course of the day he lost $3.3 million dollars in high-stakes poker play. But before you feel too bad for the guy, you should know a couple things. First of all, he's still up about $750,000 for the month. Yes, as of a couple weeks ago, that number was closer to $6 million, but making six figures over the course of a month ain't too shabby. And the second fact that tends to lessen sympathy towards Isuldur1 - he lost all that cash by being brave, and foolish, enough to play multi-table, heads-up action against both Patrik Antonius and Phil Ivey, simultaneously. Obviously that's a risky proposition for anyone who actually cares about money.

Partially offsetting his disastrous sessions against Antonius and Ivey, Isuldur1 has done substantially better against at least one other opponent. He has taken Tom "durrrr" Dwan for over $3 million in the last couple weeks.

The furious online action shows no signs of slowing down, so next weekend could well bring another record-setting pot. Or maybe Isuldur1's stash of ancient viking gold will finally run out, and he'll have to hit the $1/$2 tables until he can get his bankroll back up.

This past Sunday, "bearbeer", a Swedish pro player, got past 965 other runners to take down the $100K guaranteed event on Cake. The hand leading up to the final table was one of those things that prevents honest hard-working poker players [1] from sleeping at night. Two players got all in: AK vs. A9. Flop comes K-x-y rainbow. Game over, right? Nope - running 9's gave us our final table and the 11th place finisher the seed of a nightmare.

When the shouting was over, we had this:

We had some great poker and big buzz from the fans on the rail. Finally it got down to two of the finest, and they got all the money in with very respectable hands:

bearbeer faded the six-ish outs and took down $29,270 for first place. "GREINKE 4 CY" had to settle for about $20,600, which will still get him season tickets to the KC Royals.

bearbeer says that he plays 25-30 hours per week, including the big Sunday tournaments. And we've definitely got that - recall that 966 players is substantially larger than the WSOP field that Chris Moneymaker beat to win the championship six short years ago. And now that the breaks in Cake's tournaments are 100% synchronized, there's no excuse for you not to play in a bunch of 'em. See you out there.

[1] Is that phrase an oxymoron?

The world of online poker witnessed a historic moment last night, as a player won the biggest pot in the history of the online game. Poker pro Patrick Antonius took down a pot worth $878,958.50 while playing Pot-limit Omaha. His unlucky opponent for the historic hand was a notorious online whiz called Isuldur1.

Amazingly, that was only one of several six-figure pots up for grabs in the epic online Omaha session. At the end of the evening, Antonius was up a whopping $2.7 million dollars. Not bad for a night's work. The unprecedented battle took place at a $500/$1,000 PLO table and lasted over 2,000 hands.

Antonius won the record-setting pot after going all-in and being called by Isuldur1. At that point, with 4 cards showing, both players had top two pairs and were looking at a chopped pot as the most likely outcome. But an 8 on the river completed Antonius' straight, and delivered him nearly nine hundred grand.

Both players have had pretty solid years at the online tables. Antonius is reportedly up almost $8.5 million this year. And until last night, Isuldur1 was thought to be #2 on the online money list this year. He's now fallen down the ranks a little, but is thought to still be up around $2 million bucks in recent action. That's pretty good, but somehow you can imagine he's not feeling too happy after last night's beat-down.