Weekly Poker News Report March 14th-20th

It has been another action-packed week in the poker world and as usual there have been a few stories which slipped under our noses. Below you can find the biggest poker news stories of the week that we failed to report on including news of Portugese prodigy José Macedo, the Zynga Poker hacker gets jailed, and Full Tilt Poker announce the Onyx Cup Series which feature massive buy-ins!

José Macedo Enters Poker Spotlight

There have been rumours for quite some time now about a young Portugese player who has turned a €30 deposit into millions. As you would expect with such a story there were quite a few people who didn’t believe it for a second, while others took insipration from it. However this week on 2+2 a poster by the username ‘girah’ created a thread a revealed himself as the Portugese prodigy everyone has been talking about, with his real name being José Macedo. José told his story in great detail stating how his mother let him use her credit card to deposit €30 on Betfair Poker where he began playing at the 1c/2c real money poker tables. After a month and a half of playing for between 6 and 10 hours per day he had turned the €30 into $2,500. José managed to reach the $5/$10 No-Limit Hold’em tables however he didn’t have as much success s he previously enjoyed. Showing great maturity and a determination to succeed he enlisted the help of Cardrunners instructor Daniel ‘jungleman12′ Cates and other top coaches, all of whom helped him get to the level he is at today, playing in the $25/$50 and $50/$100 No-Limit Hold’em heads-up tables. Since entering the spotlight he has already had several offers of sponsorship from poker sites, and here is a fantastic interview of him from PokerStatic.com:

Zynga Poker Hacker Gets Jail

29-year old Ashley Mitchell (who is from Devon in the UK) has been jailed for two years after admitting five charges of hacking and theft in relation to stealing virtual chips from Zynga Poker. Zynga Poker is a gaming application on social network website Facebook and allows people to purchase virtual chips to play poker with. Ashley Mitchell hacked into the site and stole 400 billion virtual chips which amounted to a total value of £7.4 million. After stealing the chips he sold a third of them for just £53,000 – a fraction of their value, and the court also heard that he used false Facebook accounts and a front company to attempt to sell the chips. The court heard that Mitchell was suffering from a gambling addiction at the time of the offence and that he was spending as much as £1,000 per day on gambling websites.  He was also sentenced to an extra 30 weeks for breaching a 40-week suspended sentence imposed in 2008 for hacking.

Onyx Cup Series Announced

Full Tilt Poker have announced the creation of the Onyx Cup Series which is a series of live poker tournaments with buy-ins ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The series will be recorded and televised, and will feature six events with an estimated $30million prize pool and is open to anyone, however realisticly we only expect the best poker players in the world and rich businessmen to stump up such large buy-ins, although Full Tilt Poker are offering players the opprtunity to qualify for each event. Event 1 will take place in Las Vegas on May 11th-12th and will feature a $100k buy-in, with Event 2 also taking place in Las Vegas with a $100k buy-in and will take place on July 7th-8th. Both Event 3 and 4 will take place in Asia in September, and Event 5 will take place somewhere in Europe in October. Then the Grand Finale will take place in Las Vegas in December with a $250k buy-in. Points are awarded in each tournament depending on where players finish and the player who finishes top of the leaderboard at the end of the series will have their name engraved on the Onyx Cup, win a luxury sports car, and have all of their winnings to spend!