In poker, we imagine that some hands just won't fold. However, then we got to see Daniel Petersen bluff his opponent with quads on stream.
Preflop was normal, on the flop the Brazilian called a 1bb bet, on the turn he check-raised 2.5bb-6.5bb, and on the river he folded to all-in and showed his cards.
"That's the craziest fold I've ever seen 🤯♠️," Daniel wrote. "No action in this hand can be explained. I'm bluffing... He thinks for a long time... And then this happens. I've never seen anything like it before. Apparently, he's marked me as a nit."
Bookmaker Circa Sports held a massive NFL game with a prize pool of $18.7 million.
Entry cost $1,000, and each player was officially limited to 10 entries (though some made many more, which the organizers are quite lenient about). This year, 18,718 entries were recorded, more than exceeding the $15 million guarantee.
Before each NFL round, players had to choose one team. If it wins, they advance; if it loses or ties, they're eliminated. In the next round, they must switch teams; picking the same team twice is strictly prohibited. There are no consolation prizes in the tournament; the game is played in a winner-take-all format.
As a result, 5 participants went through all 20 rounds without defeat and shared an impressive prize fund.
Each received $3,743,600.
After the results were announced, it turned out that Galen Hall was behind both winners :
– When your two teams crossed the finish line.
A discussion has erupted on social media about how nearly all participants are breaking the rules and registering more than 10 teams.
Galen confirmed this:
– At the start of the tournament, I had 50 entries. 0.27% of the total, but that's not even close to the volume of some players. I don't have enough friends to make more entries.
The other winning team included retired poker regulars Jason Sommerville and Gabe Patgorski as shareholders.
And David Baker reported that 4 out of 5 winners are poker players:
Galen had 2 of the 5
Jason had 1
A poker player from Austin (BonespPoker) and his group had another
The 5th entry has not been identified as of yet
"I'm not surprised," replied Shaun Deeb. "Had some discussions last year with someone. Poker kind would be good at this style tourney even without a sports background."
"Somerville has a very long sports-betting background, which you absolutely must have," one commentator disagreed.
Doug Polk's poker house bans two suspects for fixing cards after vlogger's warning.
A complaint made inside the parlor resulted in expulsion and banning at a Texas card room. Two men were removed from The Lodge Card Club in Round Rock after vlogger Anthony Martino recognized the pair and alerted staff. The suspicion: the players were working together to mark cards and manipulate the dynamics of the table.
Martino claims that the two already had a similar history in poker rooms in Florida and California and that there was a pattern of behavior: insistence on positioning themselves in specific seats and attempts to "surround" opponents to extract more value with signals and pre-arranged plays. After the approach, Lodge employees inspected the deck and, according to the report, found evidence of marking, leading to the immediate ban.
The Lodge is one of the most famous poker rooms in the USA, as one of its owners is none other than poker and content star Doug Polk.
Seth Davis revealed what irritates him at the poker table:
Nothing dorkier than answering in big blinds when someone asks how much you're playing.
“False. Answering in M is far worse,” Mike McDonald disagreed.
– Exactly: “I’m in the orange zone.”
Ed. – M is the number of chips divided by the sum of the blinds and antes. This stack valuation system in tournaments was devised by Dan Harrington. He identified five color-coded zones based on stack size. The system didn't catch on and was quickly abandoned almost 20 years ago.
Barry Carter said, "I always answer in the ICM value of my stack to put the idea of a 19-way chop in people's heads early"
A couple of weeks ago, WPT Global announced the signing of Ren Lin as its new ambassador.
The comments were flooded with posts claiming that Ren Lin was a cheater who had recently been banned for ghosting.
Read ReadMany began tagging the official World Poker Tour account, but the WPT immediately distanced itself from the situation:
– WPT Global purchases a license from the World Poker Tour. We do not officially endorse any of their ambassadors.
Both this tweet and WPT Global's original tweet announcing the news were soon deleted.
Another WPT subsidiary, ClubWPT Gold, has joined the action.
They posted a photo of Lin on their account with the comment BANNED.
This tweet also soon disappeared, but WPT Global managed to respond to it:
— So, is it illegal to sign successful ambassadors in 2026? We thoroughly vet everyone we work with, including Tony Lin, and are completely confident in his integrity and professionalism. We select ambassadors based on proven effectiveness and results; we don't care about follower count. Let others prioritize 'influencers.' We're not like that. Tony will share his side of the story in more detail soon.
But this text also did not last long.
Two days later, WPT Global re-announced its contract with Lin. This post hasn't suffered the same fate as the previous ones and is still available on Twitter.
Amid all this chaos, professional players and The Chip Race podcast hosts David Lappin and Dara O'Kearney, who also promoted WPT Global, severed their ties with the room.
Barry Carter described the situation with a meme.
Meanwhile, Ren Lin, sporting a new sponsor sticker, won two events at the King Poker Cup series in Korea.
Winning the $15,000 Main Event earned him $600,700.
ACR Poker CEO Phil Nagy embraced a healthy lifestyle and lost over 60 kilograms.
Phil plans to compete in a triathlon this summer, which will involve swimming 750 metres in open water, cycling 19.2 kilometres and running 5.2 kilometres.
At the beginning of January, the PokerGo studio held a freeroll with a prize pool of $1 million.
The tournament attracted 54 players – the top 40 from the 2025 leaderboard and winners of various qualifiers and competitions. Participants began the game with different stacks based on their points earned the previous year. Alex Foxen started as the chip leader, but failed to cash.
Chad Eveslage won, thus making up for his failures in the high-stakes mixed games at PhenomPoker.
"Found a way to bubble my first tourney for the year before even buying," complained Shaun Deeb. "In 41st after a few dropouts in eligible PGT leaderboard, sad. Guess no Vegas until May"
Josh Arieh suspects his love for sneakers has taken on an unhealthy nature.
I might have a sneaker problem.
Jungleman fought a boxing match against Ryan "Elf" Noel. His opponent knocked him down, but the fight was ruled a no contest.
"This fight was definitely one of the crazier things I’ve done," Cates wrote after the fight . "Ryan Noel was tougher than I expected and misunderstood something for the apparent loss..
Good news is I feel almost normal in spite of getting slammed.
Would fight more so long as it doesn’t cause permanent damage."
The fight has caused controversy, since plenty of onlookers said the winning punch was a cheap shot.
It's undeniable that the referee started the action again, and that's clearly shown in videos.
Stephen Chidwick says that "real profit" is much lower than the $76 million in prize money.
— Hey Stephen! With 76m in winnings, how much is profit?
— I don’t have exact numbers from the earlier part of my career but somewhere in the $5M-$10M range
In a rare moment of transparency, Stephen Chidwick answered in an AMA on Reddit how much of his monumental live tournament winnings, around US$76 million, actually turned into profit. The estimate surprised those who only look at rankings: according to him, the net profit would be between US$5 million and US$10 million, and even then without specifying the exact number.
In the same conversation, he also touched on a side effect of the solver era: the ease of "memorizing answers" may be diminishing the practice of fundamentals such as reading ranges, reasoning from scratch, and adapting to what people actually do—not what the idealized simulation suggests.
Tombos21 shared what needs to be worked on this year:
The most important position to study, by a large margin, is the Big Blind. You play the most pots and commit the most money from this position.
Make 2026 the year you become an absolute monster out of the Big Blind!
Last week, Martin Zamani posted a video that took social media by storm.
Massive bot farm on Ignition/Bovada. They’ve know about for ages and done nothing. It’s highstakes and this isn’t the entire operation either and they just don’t care.
Enough is enough of this shit.(I didn’t create the bot or the video)
I don’t think this is happening on other major sites either.
It always affects me very negatively to post things but I still do not sure why.
Representatives of ClubWPT Gold and CoinPoker were quick to assure readers that their rooms are successfully combating bots.
"It's a problem ubiquitious in online poker," CoinPoker wrote on its account. "but we refund players affected by bots, around $156k was refunded in 2025 for example, following 98 bot accounts being banned. We thank the players who supported our security efforts through reports and feedback."
Ignition representatives paused briefly, and only a couple of days later wrote that the video was outdated – it was recorded in 2022, and all bots from it had long been banned.
But Martin was not convinced by this answer:
– This is from the same person who sent the vide. This tourney is dated 2024.
Not that anyone believes you scumbags. We’ve all played on the site we believe what we can see, which is infinite stalling and collusion, not you lying f**ks.
200k Tourney
100 Bots
- Rebuy unlimited for 4 hours, forming a monster army.
- When late registration closes player base is 300.
- This means 33% of the tourney is us and our odds to win 1st place with a 67k first place pot.
Additional Factors
- Top 224 get paid, which is amazing for our farm. 1/100 get a chance to place
- Card sharing 4/6 card advantage
- Losing to myself 33% of the time
- Super aggressive play style calculated
- Only 25 bots need to place top 224 for 50% of our investment back meaning 22.5k invested will really by an 11.5k risk for better odds than the stock market
In the comments, many players confirmed that the bot problem in Ignition is more pressing than ever.
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