It was a good day for Europeans as Nadar Kakhmazov won Russia’s third bracelet of the summer in a $5k No-Limit Hold’em event, and Rifat Palevic picked up Sweden’s first in the brand new $1k Super Turbo Bounty event.

It happens.

You get a dream final table lineup, full of superstars, bracelet winners, and high rollers, and a complete unknown ends up winning the thing.

Event #35: $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em always produces a high-quality final table, but this year was exceptional. The former World Poker Tour (WPT) Player of the Year (POY) Faraz Jaka was leading the way followed by bracelet winner Sam Soverel, former November Niner Kenny Hallaert, and The Big Huni himself Chris Hunichen.

It was a good day for Europeans as Nadar Kakhmazov won Russia’s third bracelet of the summer in a $5k No-Limit Hold’em event, and Rifat Palevic picked up Sweden’s first in the brand new $1k Super Turbo Bounty event.

It happens.

You get a dream final table lineup, full of superstars, bracelet winners, and high rollers, and a complete unknown ends up winning the thing.

Event #35: $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em always produces a high-quality final table, but this year was exceptional. The former World Poker Tour (WPT) Player of the Year (POY) Faraz Jaka was leading the way followed by bracelet winner Sam Soverel, former November Niner Kenny Hallaert, and The Big Huni himself Chris Hunichen.

An excellent contrast in this World Series of Poker review with the former World Champion Joe McKeehen winning his second bracelet, and a man who wouldn’t even know who Joe McKeehen was, winning his first.

Joe McKeehen has followed the example set by Joe Cada, Jonathan Duhamel, and Carlos Mortensen as a former World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event Champ who has gone on to win a second gold bracelet this side of the Noughties.

The 2015 World Champion can now boast Championship victories in both premier No-Limit and Limit Hold’em events, after besting a field of 120 entrants, in the $10,000 Limit Hold’em Championship, a 9% increase on last year’s numbers.

Limit events may remind you of the days of pay phones, and pearl necklaces, but they seem to attract a particular type of consistency. The defending champion Ian Johns finished 11th, and the 2015 champion Ben Yu finished fourth two days after winning the Limit 2-7 Lowball Triple Draw Championship.

Native American tribes-1, MGM Resorts-0.

The first round of MGM Resorts International’s extended legal fight to stop Connecticut from allowing a competing casino in the state ended in a loss for the casino operator.

On Wednesday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld the Connecticut judge’s dismissal of MGM’s lawsuit on grounds that the casino company had no standing to sue over the 2015 law, which formalized a process for the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribal nations to seek a town willing to host a casino.

MGM’s lawyers, if you recall, headed to New York City in November to stop the tribes from starting the construction of their casinos and keep Connecticut’s gambling money from flowing across state lines to MGM Springfield.

A Philippine House committee handling the Resorts World Manila (RWM) attack probe has summoned three other casino operators to check on the condition of security at their venues.

BusinessWorld reported that the Philippine House of Representatives are planning to hold an executive session with other casino operators to determine their “readiness” in the face of security threats similar to what happened in RWM earlier this month.

At least 37 people were killed when problem gambler Jessie Carlos went on a rampage and torched game tables inside the integrated resorts. Carlos then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

“I respectfully ask that before we terminate the hearings that we send out invitations to all major gaming casino operators in the country to give this joint committee a full briefing of the state of readiness to prevent a similar event from happening again,” Paranaque Representative Gus S. Tambunting, chairman of the House committee on games and amusement, according to the news report. “This should be done in an executive session to maintain and assure security… After this briefing, we can then consider these proceedings terminated so that each of us can give a report and recommendation to the rest members of the House.”

Another executive has left James Packer’s beleaguered Crown Resorts group.

On Wednesday, the Australian casino operator announced that Robert Rankin has resigned as a director of Crown Resorts. Rankin previously served as chairman of Crown Resorts, but stepped down from his position in January.

Rankin was replaced by John Alexander, a longtime confidant of the Packer family, who was appointed as executive chairman of Crown Resorts with effect from February 1. James Packer also returned to the board more than a year after relinquishing his seat to focus on the casino group’s international expansion opportunities.

Alexander thanked Rankin “for his contribution as a director” as well as “his time as Crown Resorts chairman.” Rankin, for his part, said he’s “proud of the direction that Crown Resorts is taking and my role in its development.”

Following in the footsteps of the United States, the South Korean government has announced that it will auction 216 bitcoins that it confiscated in 2016.

The cache of digital currency, currently worth close to $600,000, was seized by members of the South Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, who arrested a 33-year-old individual on charges of operating an “obscenity” website, Seoul Economic Daily reported.

This will be the first auction of its kind in South Korea.

Confiscated financial assets, including digital currencies like bitcoin, can be auctioned off by the government, according to the Korea Asset Management Corporation (KAMCO), which oversees all state-owned properties and development.

“Failure plays an important role in innovation because it offers cycles of learning if you fail early, fail often and learn from your mistakes. If you keeping failing for the same reasons and do nothing about it, that’s the definition of insanity”- Dr. Samuel H. Liggero, Professor of the Practice, Tufts Gordon Institute

Last week I attended the GamCrowd Tech Conference, an event dedicated to the latest technical innovations influencing our industry today.  A presentation delivered by Digital Transformation Consultant Marcus Wareham covered the importance of failure in the pursuit of innovation and how we can learn from our mistakes.

Fail fast and carry on, because if you don’t, you won’t succeed”, said Wareham.

Wareham cited several examples of companies in our industry who innovated and failed, learned from their mistakes and tried again.  Paddy Power, for example, launched “Paddy Power In-Play” in 2013, an app allowing customers to place bets through Facebook, but the feature only lasted for one year due to its failure to catch on.  Fast forward three years and after learning from their failure, Paddy Power is trying again, but this time bets can be placed via Facebook Messenger and customers do not have to bother with downloading an app.

New York’s legal online poker hopes appear to have died of neglect in the state Assembly for the second year in a row.

The New York state legislature wrapped up the final day of its legislative session on Wednesday without the Assembly taking any action on the online poker bill the state Senate approved last week.

Some other, more important issues also went unresolved, and lawmakers suggested they may reconvene for a brief period this summer to address issues like mayoral control over New York City schools, but the Assembly’s inaction certainly appears to have doomed Sen. John Bonacic’s S-3898 poker bill to the ash heap of history and the state’s online poker players to (at least) another year of legal limbo.

The Assembly’s reluctance to tackle the online poker issue was telegraphed earlier this week when Assemblyman Gary Pretlow told the New York Daily News that there’d been “some opposition” to the poker bill coming up for a vote.

888Poker has announced plans to introduce shot clocks at all 888Live events, beginning with the Main Event and High Roller at the forthcoming 888Live London event in October.

“What about the 888Live Main Event?”

Those six peas in a pod arrived in my email box yesterday; nothing else, just a single sentence – but I felt the emotion as if I was sitting next to the sender at the moment his fingers hit the keyboard.

It was a reaction to this article: Is it Time to Bin Poker’s Triple Crown And Replace it With a Grand Slam, where I drew attention to the growth of the partypoker LIVE MILLION brand and the decline of the PokerStars Championship & Festival brand.