Two professional poker players, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, will take on a computer program called Polaris in the world’s first man-versus-machine poker tournament. The challenge will run over two days and 500 hands of Texas hold ‘em at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Vancouver for a total prize pot of $50,000.

Polaris is the most sophisticated poker-playing program yet written and the product of years of research and development by a team of artificial intelligence experts at the University of Alberta in Canada.

This morning, top poker pro Daniel ‘Kid Poker’ Negreanu has signed on to represent Team PokerStars and in a separate agreement all player accounts on his online poker site, Full Contact Poker, will be transferred to Poker Stars.

Although FCP will be shutting down its casino and poker operations, the site will continue to host Negreanu’s blog, the forum, and a new video poker school. The transfer of accounts will happen as soon as next week.

Search engine giant Yahoo! has announced it will launch its own real money online poker room hosted at yahoo.co.uk. The site is a partnership between Yahoo! and St. Minver Ltd., a gaming group located in Gibraltar. The poker site will be a part of the International Poker Network owned and operated by Sweden’s Boss Media AB.

The Yahoo! UK & Ireland Games Web site also supports real money online Bingo.

Online poker site, Paradise Poker, one of the first poker websites has shut down, it’s parent company Sportingbet announced Friday.

The company will retain its brand name but all existing Paradise players will be moved to the more lucrative Boss Media platform.

Paradise Poker took one of the biggest hits when it was forced to pull out of the US market due to the newly legislated Anti-Online Gambling Law.

Quillian Nagel of Canada took home over a million dollars top prize after winning PokerStars’ first Moneymaker Millionaire poker tournament at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas’ Paradise Island Tuesday last week.

Nagel, whose winnings included an Aston Martin DB9, outplayed 830,000 other competitors inwhat was the world’s largest free online poker tournament, hosted by PokerStars.

Progressive Gaming International Corporation (PGIC), a leading provider of technology and services to casinos, recently teamed up with Harrah’s Casino to launch and market the World Series of Poker ‘Peer to Peer’ Texas Hold’em gaming system.

The peer-to-peer poker game system is designed to allow poker players to compete on a wired or wireless device, within the casino grounds, connecting to a secure Intranet server that controls and coordinates the action.

Crave Entertainment, a leading publisher of console videogames, will host a press breakfast with Howard Lederer and Annie Duke, stars of their best-selling poker video game series, World Championship Poker.

The Southwestern breakfast with Howard & Annie will be held on Jyly 14, 2006 9am-10:30am at the Rio All-Suite Casino, which is also the current location of the ongoing 2006 World Series of Poker tournaments.

(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 17, 2006– 2K Sports, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. has announced that World Poker Tour (WPT) for the PSP system is slated for release this spring.

World Poker Tour for PSP features real-life professional poker stars and venues featured in the popular World Poker Tour television series with enhanced A.I. players, [...]