TJ Cloutier's WSOP bracelet feels like it belongs on my wrist.

The Eagle has landed! Yes, we’ve finally got our hands on the WSOP bracelet that we bought off of eBay. We’ll be shipping it off to its rightful owner, T.J. Cloutier, very soon. It just feels so right on my wrist though. Like it was destined to be there, forever… and ever…

Anyway, we were going to ship it back today, but it won’t hurt to just hold onto it for the weekend. We’ll send it off soon. Probably. Maybe. Probably.

YOU’LL HAVE TO PRY MY PRECIOUS BRACELET FROM MY COLD DEAD WRIST!

Wow, sorry about that. Not sure what happened there. Anyway, yeah we’ll return TJ’s WSOP bracelet soon. Probably.

Gold Spree has entered the reward phase. Enjoy!

February is a Gold Spree month at Cake Poker, which means that the first half of the month gave players the opportunity to establish a boost in their rewards for their play in the second half of the month. Additionally, Cake Poker players were also given the chance to win a seat in a $25,000 Kamikaze tournament.

At the start of the month every player was given a Frequent Player Point goal to achieve by February 15. Those who made it got a seat in the $25K Kamikaze. Those who exceeded it will be earning up to 300% more rewards through the last half of the month.

The Kamikaze just finished running and it paid out the top 200 players with the top five finishers winning more than $1,000 each and first place walking away with $5,000. Anyone who made their FPP Gold Spree goal could be a winner since Kamikazes run automatically and players don’t even need to be logged in to participate.

To see if you made your FPP goal, log into Cake’s poker client and check under the “My Account” tab. For those players who surpassed their FPP goal, they will be enjoying a boost the Gold Chips they are awarded between February 15 and February 28.

Cake Poker players will all have received an email detailing their exact bonuses so be sure to check your email to find out what you’re earning.

If you still have questions on the online poker reward extravaganza that is Gold Spree check out the Gold Spree FAQ page.

Entering the Final Table third in chips was enough for Messaoud Bouchaib to win the 2010 ASOP, the $6,000 prize for first and the ASOP Gold and Diamond Bracelet worth $10,000 that went with the win.

The 2010 London Affiliate Conference kept up the tradition of holding the Affiliate Series of Poker (ASOP) thanks to sponsorship from Cake Poker.

The affiliates and affiliate managers battled it out with a field of 54 players hunting down there piece of the cash prizes.

The 2-day event saw 31 players eliminated at the end of Day 1 leaving the remaining 23 players, with an average chip stack of 11,700, to duke it out on Day 2.

With a super aggressive structure seeing blinds go up every 20 minutes, players turned up the heat on Day 2 resulting in 15 players being eliminated in 40 mintes! Finalt table names and chip counts looked like this:

Seat 1: Chris Phillips – 40,000 chips

Seat 2: Nick Gandy – 28,000 chips

Seat 3: Antal Babarczi – 57,000 chips

Seat 4: Vlad Pinte – 22,000 chips

Seat 5: Anders Van Riesen – 52,000 chips

Seat 6: Vael Haber – 16,000 chips

Seat 7: Messaoud Bouchaib – 45,000 chips

Seat 8: Tony James – 16,000 chips

The 300/600 blinds led to more super aggressive play and Tony James going home as the bubble boy. That left the following prizes to be scooped:

7th place $250 – Vlad Pinte

6th place $500 – Nick Gandy

5th place $750 – Anders Van Riesen

4th place $1,200 – Vael Haber

3rd place $1,700 – Antal Babarczi

Heads-up play began between Messaoud and Chris with Messaoud holding a 4-1 chip lead. The final hand came when Messaoud raised pre-flop for more than Chris’ remaining stack. Chris made the call and it was Messaoud’s K-2 suited against Chris’ Q-high. The board held no love for Chris and Messaoud Bouchaib became the 2010 ASOP Champion!

2nd place $3,000 – Chris Phillips

1st place $6,000 plus the ASOP Gold and Diamond Bracelet worth $10,000 - Messaoud Bouchaib

Congratulations to Messaoud Bouchaib (pictured above enjoying his post-victory photo-op) and all those who cashed and thanks to everyone who participated. See you all next year at the next conference and ASOP.

Learn more about the many joys of being a Cake Poker Affiliate.

Cake Poker players make a great contribution for Haitian relief.

Calls went out to Cake Poker players to help the people of Haiti in their time of need and the response was fantastic with a total of $16,720 donated from the Cake Poker community!

On January 14, Cake Poker announced a series of “holding tank” tournaments for poker players to register in to make donations for Haitian relief via the American Red Cross. After two weeks, holding tank donations looked like this:

$5 Holding Tank – 464 donations

$25 Holding Tank – 124 donations

$100 Holding Tank – 40 donations

$200 Holding Tank – 9 donations

$500 Holding Tank – 11 donations

Now that Cake Poker has calculated the final donation amounts they will double it making for a total donation of $33,440!

Thanks again to all of you who took a hit on your bankroll to help ease the suffering of the people of Haiti.

TJ Cloutier's WSOP bracelet is on its way to Cake Poker HQ.

As we implied, rather blatantly in a previous post, Cake Poker did in fact purchase TJ Cloutier’s WSOP bracelet off eBay. Our initial impulse upon seeing the auction was to say, “Hey this is a cool piece of poker history. We love poker. We should buy a WSOP bracelet!” So we did.

Since winning the bid, and celebrating wildly, we have taken some time to reflect on our glorious new prize. As much as we would love to have a WSOP bracelet, or even award it to one of our cherished poker players, we can’t, in good conscience, keep it from the man who rightfully won it; which is why we’ve decided to return it to TJ Cloutier… just as soon as we’re done having some fun with it.

No, there will be no sacrilegious treatment of the artifact, but we figure we’ve earned a few photo shoots with it, maybe a couple nights wearing it to a buddy’s home game. We’ll just hold onto it for a couple days. Call it a finder’s fee.

The bracelet is currently in the mail and on its way and should hit our wrists sometime next week. Stay tuned.

eBay seems to be full of surprises lately.

Who knew there were so many wonderful things on eBay? The team members here at Cake Poker only recently caught on to all the marvelous items on sale, including: electronics, bracelets, CDs, bracelets, cars, pet supplies, bracelets and all kinds of exciting memorabilia.

We did, however, find ourselves mourning the lack of poker paraphernalia. “If only there was a way we could buy a piece of poker history,” a Cake Poker executive cried out in despair.

Unfortunately, we were only able to find one little poker trinket of interest. A mere bauble, if you will. Nothing to get overly excited about, really.

“What is it? And what will you do with it,” you ask?

You’ll just have to wait and find out.

More to come.

Starbucks! shares a bit about himself and his hot run on Cake Poker.

"Starbucks!" might have included an exclamation in his screen name because he’s had too much coffee, or maybe it’s because he’s just excited to be running hot in Cake Poker live tournament qualifiers.

It recently popped up on the Cake Blog radar that Starbucks! has been cleaning up on qualifiers to live poker tournaments. He has qualified through Cake Poker for the 2009 WSOP Main Event, the Playboy Mansion Aces and Angels tournament, the 2009 English Poker Open, and now more recently, he’s won a $7,500 2010 Irish Open prize package.

We asked "Starbucks!" to tell us a bit about himself and here’s what he had to say:

I’ve been playing poker professionally for about six years now. I live in Yuba City, Ca. I’m 36-years-old and am married to my wife Helen, and have a three-year-old and a four-month-old. I went to school University of Oregon got my BA. I then got my MBA from Chico State. I never used the degree. Before poker, I taught tennis full-time.   played tennis at University of Oregon from 91-95.

I won seats to WSOP, Playboy Tourney and Ireland I think at Cake. I busted day 2 in the 2010 WSOP main event. Ireland isn’t until April, but I am looking forward to it.

I’ve had some decent cashes though, but none at Cake.  Fifth in the Monte Carlo 2007 EPT finale for $520,000.  Ninety-sixth in the WSOP main for 77k.  Cashed in Aussie Millions for 25k. I finished 40th or so at the 2009 EPT San Remo.  

I play both MTTs and cash games. MTT live event qualifiers are my favorite, but Cake only runs one a week. I usually play the live qualifiers at Cake and the $125k or $250k guarantee (no success yet). I think I won a $30 Rebuy for $5k or so at Cake also a few months ago.

Thanks for taking the time to tell us about yourself Starbucks! and good luck at the poker tables.

All Haiti relief donations made through Cake Poker will be matched.

In response to the crisis in Haiti, Cake Poker has established three special tournament “holding tanks” which will allow players to make donations to the American Red Cross for Haitian relief simply by registering for them. All donations made by players will be matched by Cake Poker.

You can make a donation by registering in one of the tournaments listed in red and titled “Haiti Donations (not an MTT).” There are three donation amounts, $5, $25, and $100. Remember, there will be no actual poker playing involved, these are strictly for donation purposes.

The donation tournaments are currently up and open for registration in the Cake Poker Tournament Lobby and will run until midnight ET on January 31.

EDIT: $200 and $500 donation options have now also been added.

A new poker movie is headed straight to DVD. Will it be a another bust?

Poker movies seem to have gotten worse over the years. Between the time of the Cincinnati Kid and Rounders, there were decent poker films being made. But, seemingly along with the poker boom and Moneymaker’s WSOP win, that all seemed to change.

Hollywood looked at poker and said, “This is popular. Make some movies about poker. Doesn’t need to be good, people will go anyway.” As a result, I’m still trying to wash the stink of films like Lucky You off.

So it’s with a great deal of cautious optimism that I say, based on the trailer, Shark City might not be terrible. While Shark City saw its debut back in March of 2009, it only hit our radar recently as it was announced to receive its DVD release on this Feb. 16. 

If you managed to see this movie somehow, it seems to have only been screened at various film festivals, then let us know how it is in the comments section below since we’d really hate to have to sit through another Lucky You.

Mariah Carey drunk is preferable to Mariah Carey sober.

Let me preface this post by saying that I would never elect Mariah Carey as the Cake Poker Babe of the Week, but drunk Mariah Carey? Now that’s a different story.

As most of you know, Mariah Carey is all over the news right now because she gave an acceptance speech that was slurred, incoherent, embarrassing and weird. The media has taken the angle of treating this as some kind of bizarre occurrence and continually poses headline questions like, “What Happened to Mariah?” or “Why Mariah’s Speech Was So Bizarre?”

It doesn’t take a team of investigative journalists. It’s just a drunk singer slurring her way through an acceptance speech. It’s not a mystery or even a big deal. The woman was at a celebratory event and she got hammered. She’s not a politician, she’s a musician. She’d be remiss if she wasn’t drunk on occasion.

Also, what seemed to be missed by the media is that her acceptance speech for the People’s Choice Awards seemed to be delivered a little under the influence. Not to judge, just saying that I think the story with Mariah is not that she was drunk but that she was drunk on Tuesday and then drunk again on Thursday. I’d like to be the first to say, congratulations.

Anyway, here’s to you Mariah. You seem like an obnoxious diva from hell, but, like my grandfather used to say, pretty much everything is better with alcohol.