The rumors have been running for months and Howard Lederer has stated on several occasions that Dwan would be a major personality to sign as a Full Tilt Pro. However no one could have expected Tom “Durrrr” Dwan to become part of Team Full Tilt instead of a Red Pro. Full Tilt have more than 200 big name endorsing the site by now with most of these being Red Pro’s.

Tom Dwan will represent Full Tilt as part of the team consisting of the group of players who originally formed Full Tilt Poker including names such as Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Matusow, Seidel and Cunningham. Gus Hansen and Patrik Antonius is the recent players who has been awarded Team Full Tilt membership and this selected team of players now counts a total of 14 members where the Red Pro team has 126 players endorsing Full Tilt Poker at this point in time.

Durrrr who is known to play in the highest cash games live and online are also known for the Durrrr challenge where he offer opponents to pay them $1.500.000 versus them paying him $500.000 if they can beat him for a single cent after playing a total of 50.000 hands. Currently he is in taking on Patrik Antonius in a challenge and Tom Dwan lead the match being up $779.000 with 27185 hands played. It is expected that with the new contract Durrrr have signed, that challenge play from now on will be more consistent as it is great marketing value for Full Tilt Poker and far from what PokerStars can offer railbirds these days.

It will be exiting to follow the next Durrrr challenge as this will most likely involve either Phil Ivey or the French high stakes player David Benyamine and if the rules are changed a bit to ensure long sessions then stamina and tilt control will suddenly affect the challenge result a great part more than today.

Follow Durr at Full Tilt Poker, Sign up for a Full Tilt account with $600 in poker bonus and exclusive entry to poker freerolls.

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Full tilt poker has given a response to a lawsuit from two of its client members who allegedly claim that Full tilt is using robots which are artificially intelligent players knows as bots to control poker games and thus boosts the site’s revenue.

Larry Kennedy and Greg Omotoy are claiming that Full Tilt poker has confiscated $80,000 in United Stated Dollars from their player accounts after acting on a customer tipster that they were being operated by ‘bots’

However, representatives from full tilt poker stated that the accounts of the players under investigation were terminated according to Full tilt’s terms and conditions and in a manner more than appropriate under the circumstances of violations by the players, which were using multiple accounts.

Apparently as Full Tilt reps made clear, multiple player accounts violate not only the terms of the agreement between player and website but they also create an unfair and not equal advantage for the violators that Full tilt Poker or any other reliable and fair gaming Poker operator should and would never accept. The aim of Full tilt is to protect all players at all cost and at all times.

Full tilt reps went to state that the two claimant’s false accusations will be revealed in due course and the sad incident of this kind will soon be water under the river.
Rumors from the grapevine are that Full tilt Poker will counter sue the two claimants for defamations and other counter claims which will follow till the very end, without accepting a settlement so that is makes sure that claimants of this kind that only hunt opportunities under false accusations will think again in the future.

Full Tilt did not however respond to other charges in regards with the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), stating only that “this erroneous lawsuit and its spurious claims” would be dealt with through the courts.

Play with the Pros

Full Tilt Poker has more than 200 professional players or friends who endorse their site but amongst all these players a few stars draw a lot more attention to their name than the rest combined. Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen are the two biggest names connected with Full Tilt Poker and there is more or less not a single day where Gus Hansen is not mentioned in the Medias in regards to the action he creates on the high stake tables at Full Tilt Poker.

A great part of Gus Hansen’s life has been about competitive sports before he ended up as a world class backgammon and poker player. During his younger days (born in 1974, February 13) he was a pretty solid soccer and tennis player but when he discovered the world of backgammon in the early1990s he spent more and more time on this new passion. The passion for poker begun a few years later when he moved to California to study in 1993 and since then Gus Hansen have achieved remarkable results playing poker. More than $7.400.000 in poker tournament winnings is his results so far including 4 World Poker Tour wins and a victory at the Aussie Millions in 2007.

Gus Hansen’s first WPT victory came back in 2002 WPT season 1 at the Five Diamond World Poker Classic where he ended up winning $556.460 after beating fellow Full Tilt Poker pro John Juanda heads up. Even this was still before the poker boom really took of the field of players was fierce and other strong names had to be defeated by Gus Hansen before the title was his. The final table had many notable names on it including Freddy Deeb, Chris Bigler, John Hennigan and the prince of poker Scotty Nguyen but Gus Hansen managed to overcome all these poker stars and received all the fame, glory and cash. A new poker star was born.

Gus followed up on the victory already in 2003 where he took his second WPT title and $532.490 by winning L.A Poker Classic at the Commerce Casino this time beating another Full Tilt Poker pro Andy Bloch and the famous David “The Dragon” Pham. A few months later Gus Hansen won the prestigious World Poker Tour Bad Boys of poker title outlasting Devilfish, Phil “Unabomber” Laak and the magician Antonio Esfandiari.

2003 was not over for Gus Hansen in terms of good WPT results as he managed to end third in the Five Diamond World Poker Classic in December securing himself another quarter of a million in prize winning and almost made a back to back win in this specific tournament.

The beginning of 2004 saw Gus Hansen balst off with yet another WPT victory this time taking down the popular PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and $455.780. With three WPT titles secured in just a few years Gus Hansen was the player everybody talked about and his untraditional way of playing and the bad cards he often could show up made him the most interesting player at this point in time. He had a lot of TV exposure to his name which was well deserved and as he continued to show results more and more poker players begun to play the style Gus Hansen did as it seemed to work. Poker had suddenly become a more interesting game where the pressure by raising and reraising out conquered the solid hand selection type of style.

The three biggest cashes Gus Hansen have made in his career all followed after his amazing WPT success. In 2005 he won a cool $1.000.000 in a PokerStars invitational tournament beating Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, T.J Cloutier, Chip Reese and Barry Greenstein to grab the title. The next big tournament win came in 2007 where Gus Hansen won Aussie Millions and a little more than $1.1 million and finally he once again returned to the final table at Five Diamond World Poker Classic ending as the runner up to David Chiu but still won an astonishing $1.700.000 for his second place finish.

Even Gus Hansen still play a lot of tournaments he is more and more known from the very big cash games at Full Tilt Poker. Playing the highest Pot Limit Omaha and Mix Limit games, railbirds from all over can follow the Danish super stars bankroll swings at the poker tables. 2009 has yet to become a good year for Gus Hansen as he currently is down more than $3.000.000 but with Guy Laliberté back from out of space chances are that the owner of Cirque de Soleil might safe Gus Hansen’s online poker year.

Players who are interested in understanding more about how Gus “The Great Dane” Hansen play should invest in the book he wrote when winning Aussie Millions. The book is called “Every Hand Revealed” and is a splendid masterpiece showing how a top professional player think during hands he plays in a big live tournament.

This time it is not former employees or a professional player endorsing the online poker site who has filled a law suit against poker mastodon Full Tilt Poker. It is two poker players which has decided to claim back $80.000 withheld by Full Tilt Poker who on the other hand are arguing that the two poker players Larry Kennedy and Greg Omotoy have been using software violating the Full Tilt Poker terms and conditions while playing on the site.

For years it has been a discussion if so called poker bots are able to beat humans in the game of poker. A special research group from the University of Alberta has programmed the poker robot Polaris who on several occasions has been thrown in the ring against some of the most competitive poker players in the world. Phil Laak played against Vexbot in 2005 and ended beating it but reluctantly admitted that he had been dealt some really good cards in the session and that Vexbot might had deserved the win.

In 2007 Phil Laak and Ali Hames took on a game against Polaris which was the newest poker robot edition programmed by University of Alberta researchers. This time the match was to be played in a way that took away the luck factor. Whatever cards were dealt to Phil Laak the Polaris was dealt the same cards in the match against Ali Hames and vice versa. This way the two teams played exactly the same hands against each other and with identical flops, turns and rivers it would be easier to determine if human or machine was the better player. Four rounds of play ended with Polaris winning one match, a tie and two losses.

2008 was the year where a new and stronger Polaris ended as the winner in a match (score 3 wins-1 tie-2 losses) held in Las Vegas against 6 professional poker players including the famous Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko who is considered the worlds best Texas Hold’em Fixed Limit player.

It is without doubt possible for a machine to beat humans in the game of poker but only under very specific conditions at this point in time. Poker is a very complex game that changes depending on number of players at the table, the player types playing in the specific game and tons of other parameters who define the correct actions in a given hand. However it is only the Polaris who has shown this strength and any website trying to sell a poker bot should be looked upon as a fraudulent scam and we recommend never downloading such software as it will cause user a lot of grief.

Full Tilt Poker will do what they can do prove the two aforementioned players used robots when they played. Not because Full Tilt Poker want to keep the small pocket change $80.000 is for them but to tell the online poker players that the Full Tilt poker software will detect and make sure that any and all use of machinery that is not in compliance with the terms and conditions are subject to penalties like frozen accounts and funds being blocked.