The 2024 Amateur Poker Association & Tour (APAT) explodes into life over the weekend of January 12 when the APAT UK Team Championship take place at the home of British poker, Dusk Till Dawn. Although registration for the Team Event is closed, four side events and a UK Poker Championship (UKPC) satellite are open to all players. The APAT UK Team Championship is one of the most popular events on the APAT calendar.

The poker year has well and truly kicked off, and one of the first events of 2024 is at the Casino de Marrakech, which once again plays host to one of the first WSOP International Circuit events of the year. The festival runs from January 12-21 with 13 ring events on the schedule which includes a 2,000 High Roller and 3,000 Super High Roller. There is additionally, of course, the 1,500 WSOP Circuit Main Event, which PokerNews be bringing you live coverage from January 18-21.

The PokerStars Sunday Million is one of the longest-running Sunday majors in the online poker world and arguably the most prestigious. PokerStars has hosted dozens of special edition Sunday Millions over the year, but few, if any, have garnered as much excitement and anticipation as the New Year Series Sunday Million special edition, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. GMT on January 7. The 93rd numbered event of the PokerStars New Year Series is the $109 NLHE 8-max, Mystery Bounty Sunday Million SE.

The excitement of the holiday season may be over but the fun doesn’t have to stop with the putting away of the Christmas tree because 888poker has release the full, bustling schedule for the 2024 edition of its XL Winter Series. The 888poker XL Winter Series runs from January 14 through January 30, and features 35 numbered events, a healthy dose of side events, and combined guaranteed prize pools weighing in at over $2 million.

Michigan poker player George Janssen alleges he is the victim of an extortion scheme that began two years ago when a man held him at gunpoint outside a Detroit casino and demanded $2 million. Janssen, who last month was found zip-tied and bloodied on a rural Michigan road and claimed to have been held captive in a basement for 35 days, told family and friends that he had been regularly giving “large amounts of cash” to the men who threatened him and was seven figures in debt.

The final tabulations were wrapped up this week and Bin Weng and Kristen Foxen are now officially crowned as Global Poker Index (GPI) Players of the Year, while Nick Pupillo survived a late run from Preston McEwen to close out 2023 as the Mid-Major points champion. The final announcement was a formality for Weng and Foxen, who led their respective categories with room to spare in the final month of the year.

Daniel Negreanu lost just over $2.2 million in live tournaments last year, but he’s already booked a tournament win and cut into that deficit in 2024. The Poker Hall of Famer took down the first event of the PokerGO Tour’s Last Chance Series, a $10,100 no-limit hold’em tournament that attracted 91 entrants to the PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas on Tuesday. In the middle of the night, he wrapped up the victory with a lucky four-outer on the river to secure a $218,400 score, larger than any cash he earned in 2023.

It seems like only minutes ago that Paul Vas Nunes was crowned the 2023 Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT) Grand Final champion, but here we are at the start of the long-running tour’s 18th season. The Poker Room, formerly The Vic, will be awash with poker players from up and down the country from January 3 through January 14, each vying to get 2024 off to the best of starts.

The $35 million guaranteed PokerStars New Year Series kicked off on December 24 with the first events from a 350-tournament schedule. Stellar names have packed the 63 completed events so far, and PokerStars ambassador Lex “L. Veldhuis” Veldhuis has been mixing it up with the best of them. Veldhuis is spending the next four months in New Zealand, meaning most of the PokerStars New Year Series tournaments shuffle up and deal during the morning for him.

After losing over $2.2 million last year in poker tournaments, Daniel Negreanu made it clear in a YouTube video that he’s going to make some adjustments to his strategy in 2024. The Poker Hall of Famer shared his composite results from 2023 in a 23-minute video, and brought up some potential changes he plans to make going forward. What Went Wrong for Poker Legend? Negreanu mostly plays tournaments in Las Vegas these days, usually the PokerGO Tour high rollers and World Series of Poker (WSOP) events.

The DeepStack Extravaganza IV series kicked off on November 20 at Venetian Las Vegas and wrapped up back on December 24. The 57-event series offered more than $2.1 million in guaranteed prize pools, but wound up awarding more than double that. Even though two events were canceled due to large turnouts in marquee tournaments, the series still catered to a combined 8,893 entrants and awarded $4,702,041 in prize money. Among those to claim titles were Danny Vo (Event #18: $400 NLH Epic Stack for $4,727), Steven Perkins (Event #24: $1,100 NLH Epic Stack for $45,174), Jeff Kirby (Event #32: $600 NLH Epic Stack for $25,416), and Dominic Coombe (Event #52: $600 NLH for $36,092).

WPT Global is the place to be in early January if one of your New Year’s resolutions was to play online poker for big money in 2024 because the $4 million WPT Winter Festival is in full swing. The massive series shuffled up and dealt on Christmas Eve, meaning more than 80 WPT Global players have already become poker champions, but the WPT Winter Festival runs through to January 14, giving you ample opportunities to get your name on the scoresheet.

The Mid-States Poker Tour (MSPT) wrapped up its 14th season over the weekend at the Venetian Las Vegas. It was there that the last mid-major tournament of the year a $1,100 buy-in Main Event took place and presented players their last opportunity to win points to both the GPI Mid-Major and MSPT Player of the Year races. Both Preston McEwen and Nick Pupillo were there with the former trying to catch the latter in the GPI Mid-Major POY race, but ultimately failed to do so.

If you follow me on X at @ChadAHolloway, you know that I often post poker-themed thrift store finds. Im fond of thrifting, and with Vegas being a transient city, I can tell you that the dozens of secondhand shops are ripe for the picking. I usually hit at least a thrift store a day hunting for treasure. Pretty much any day of the week Ill come across poker books and DVDs, and occasionally Ive been known to find rare poker shirts and hats.

Police took into custody and arrested a poker player wanted in connection to a shooting that occurred Sunday morning near the Las Vegas Strip. Jon Letzkus, 45, is accused of firing his weapon from the balcony of the MGM Signature Towers overlooking the Strip at around 6:00 a.m. Although no one was injured in the shooting, authorities shut down the popular tourist area to ensure public safety. Police Locate Poker Playing Suspect Nearly five hours later, the area from the south end of the Strip and one block east on Koval Lane reopened after the suspect was apprehended.

As December ends, PokerNews offers a look back at its Top 10 Stories of 2023. The PokerNews Podcast crew which lost Jesse Fullen a couple months back but welcomed Matt Hansen alongside co-hosts Chad Holloway and Connor Richards thought wed do the same by sharing our six favorite episodes of the year! It was another great year with some strong guests that included Poker Hall of Famers Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, Billy Baxter, Phil Hellmuth, Brian Rast, Daniel Negreanu, Jack McClelland, Eli Elezra, Chris Moneymaker, and Mori Eskandani.

Kara Scott and 888poker have officially parted company, concluding a nearly eight-year partnership. Scott has flown the 888poker flag since February 2016, representing them in live events, in the online poker world, and help create long-lasting content for the poker room’s social media channels. Multi-talented Scott was announced as an 888poker ambassador on February 23, 2016, to much fanfare. Scott had previously featured on Sky Poker, Sky Television, the European Poker Tour (EPT), High Stakes Poker, GSN, Poker Central, and the WSOP on ESPN.

While 2023 was an overwhelmingly positive year for poker, it was also a tragic one. On May 14, the world celebrated Mother’s Day, Doyle Brunsonpassed away at the age of 89. Brunson’s passing hit the poker community hard as countless players mourned the loss of the Godfather of Poker, who rose to poker fame in the 1970s and played poker into the final weeks of his life. Texas Dolly left behind an unmatched poker legacy that included ten WSOP bracelets, two Main Event titles and endless tales about the Texas road gambling frontier.

Over the holidays, German high-stakes pro Daniel Smiljkovic publicly accused MonkerGuy of keeping $21,744 that Smiljkovic had mistakenly sent in a cryptocurrency exchange, while MonkerGuy denied ever receiving the money. MonkerGuy is a poker service that lets players request game-theory optimal (GTO) simulations or rent servers to help them “play mathematically perfect strategy from UTG to Big Blind.” Read About Recent Private Game Cheating Allegations Money Sent to Wrong Crypto Address Smiljkovic, a pro best known by his online poker username “SmilleThHero”, wrote in a Two Plus Twopost that he tried to send a friend $21,744 in a crypto exchange about a month ago.

Xuan Liu, a Canadian poker pro based in Toronto, works with Poker Power, A5 Labs, and WPT Global, the last of which recently set her a challenge to play poker in every province and territory of her home country. The challenge took her from St John’s Newfoundland on the east coast to Vancouver on the West and deep into the interior to Nunavut in the north. On her tour of the ten provinces and three territories of Canada, Liu started with US$1,000 (coming to a little over thirteen hundred loonies) live and US$1,000 online.

It was not long ago that the live poker world was put under lock on key as it, and the rest of the world, found itself in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of the coronavirus was PokerNews’ top story of 2020, and rightly so. Live poker returned in drubs and drabs throughout 2021, including the return of the live World Series of Poker (WSOP), with a mini poker boom achieved the following year in 2022.

The Free Poker Network (FPN) Vegas $100,000 World Championship is just around the corner and will award $25,000 to the lucky champion. The FPN Vegas $100,000 World Championship will take place Jan. 4-7 at Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas as qualifiers compete for a piece of the $100,000 prize pool. PokerNews will be on-site to provide live updates for the World Championship Main Event on Jan. 7, as well as the $200 buy-in Tag Team Trophy event on Jan.

Online poker has come a long way since the “POTRIPPER” superuser scandal of 2007, and yet… GGPoker today sensationally issued an announcement stating that a player called “Moneytaker69” had been banned, with almost $30,000 in unfair winnings confiscated. Details of the scandal came to light following a post on the 2+2 poker forums. “We sincerely apologize for the incident,” GGPoker said. “Which has caused many poker players to worry about the games integrity and shaken their trust in GGPoker to provide the best poker experience.

When it comes to the World Series of Poker (WSOP), they dont come much bigger than Phil Hellmuth. The most decorated player in WSOP history was already six bracelets ahead of his next closest competition with 16 gold bracelets, and at the 2023 WSOP he extended that lead by adding No. 17. The victory came in Event #72: $10,000 Super Turbo Bounty, a tournament that drew 642 runners that generated a $4,044,600 prize pool.