Posts Tagged ‘Jason Somerville’

Popular Jason Somerville gone from Ultimate Poker

Saturday, September 27th, 2014

Over the past year, Ultimate Poker has been busy slashing their roster of pro players. Once boasting over a dozen signed pros, Team U now has only a handful of players representing them. And you can count one less because Jason Somerville is rumored to be out at Ultimate Poker (UP).

This is quite strange, given that Somerville is one of the more popular poker pros in the game today. Furthermore, he just launched a webseries called “RunItUp,” which was supposed to be exclusive to UP. However, one sign that Somerville is done at the site includes the fact that he’s been uploading RunItUp episodes to his own channel as well.

As F5Poker reports, the main reason why Somerville could be done is because UP doesn’t have the money to keep sponsoring him. They just pulled out of the New Jersey market after their partner, Trump Taj Mahal, announced a tentative closing date of November 13th. Upon announcing their exit from New Jersey, UP’s parent company, Ultimate Gaming, also said that Taj Mahal still owes them $1.5 million in revenue payments – money they might never see.

Things haven’t exactly been booming in Nevada either. According to PokerScout, UP averages 60 cash game players an hour in Nevada, which trails market-leader WSOP.com and their 100 players an hour. UP’s cash game traffic has remained relatively stagnant over the past year, thus indicating little growth in the Silver State.

Seeing as how the poker room doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground, it’s a wonder if their remaining pros will be around in another year. Antonio Esfandiari, Danielle Andersen and Dan O’Brien are still sponsored by the Nevada-based company. But these three can’t be cheap – especially Esfandiari – and UP continues to struggle in an American online poker market that hasn’t quite taken off yet.

Daniel Negreanu rants on Full Tilt Poker

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

To those who follow Daniel Negreanu, it’s pretty clear that he hates two things in life: 1) the Lederer family, and 2) Full Tilt Poker. And lately, Negreanu has been ranting on both of these subjects in-depth through some recent video blogs that he has released.

Now the whole point of the video blogs isn’t to bash Full Tilt Poker because Negreanu also discussed his trip to Sao Paolo, Brazil for the recent LAPT event. However, the videos have gained the most attention for what Negreanu has to say about FTP and the former owners.

In the first blog, which was entitled “VBlog with some Real Talk,” much of the blog was centered on how Jason Somerville came out and said that he was gay. The Canadian was a big supporter of Somerville coming out, and said that he was proud of the New Yorker for admitting he was gay.

Moving on to Full Tilt Poker subject, KidPoker backed up earlier comments he had made about how somebody should take a baseball bat to Howard Lederer’s testicles. Negreanu continued his rant on the former FTP owner by saying that he and the other owners were “scumbags” for not speaking at all about the situation. He finished by saying that Lederer hides out like a “shameful little weasel,” and Full Tilt knew they had no money, yet still took player deposits.

The following week’s video blog contained some more rants on Howard Lederer as well as Chris Ferguson. Negreanu also talked about how Doyle Brunson made a mistake in defending these two in a recent blog post. He went as far as to relate Brunson’s post to the time when Barry Greenstein defended Russ Hamilton after the UB mess.

In any case, it’s nice to have a high-profile pro like Daniel Negreanu ranting against guys like Lederer and Ferguson because of how badly their company mismanaged player funds. Now that we’ve covered all of this, you can see the video blogs below.