3: barrels of a tangy 888 flavour including a new $55 buy-in $1m GTD multi-table tournament, a new game in Pik’em Poker, and a partnership with Poker After Dark 

After a mump and a moan about partypoker stealing its customers by deploying ‘old school tactics’, 888Poker have taken a leaf out their adversary’s playbook by introducing a Progressive Knockout Tournament (PKO) with a guarantee that’s going to feel more like peeling a butternut squash than a tangerine.

While PokerStars and partypoker hurling cobs of corn at each other these past 18-months, you would imagine the top tier of management at 888Poker would have been flapping arms like a scarecrow in the wind, but that hasn’t been the case.

The last time I touched base with the 888Poker hierarchy they weren’t behaving like someone about to drop dead on the kitchen floor while all around them people continued to fry eggs, oblivious, to the mass of 8s twitching nervously by their Air Max 97s.