I am writing with a few pieces of news from Italy, where poker h¬as never been so popular. I just recently played in some live tournaments here, and right now I’m enjoying playing a lot online, too.
My most recent live tournaments were on the Italian Poker Tour (IPT). I played at the Sanremo stop in September and then again in Nova Gorica, Slovenia — just over the border from Italy — in October.
Things didn’t go too well in Sanremo, where I ran into a cooler on Day 1 and busted from the Main Event early. But in Nova Gorica the tournament went better. There I survived to Day 3 and into the money, finishing 25th when 47 players made the cash.
Pier Paolo Fabretti
Speaking of tournaments, there was some big legal news over here recently that will affect Italian players like me who sometimes like to travel elsewhere to play.
A court ruling announced that winnings in other countries’ casinos are no longer taxable by Italy. This was an important development for us, because the earlier law had negatively affected players’ ability to go abroad to play in events such as on the European Poker Tour. But now many will get to play more of those events, and I know I’m planning to play more on the EPT going forward, including possibly EPT Prague in December.
Meanwhile, the Italian Championship of Online Poker (ICOOP) is going on this month on PokerStars.it, which is a favorite tournament series of mine. Some may not realize that we have the ICOOP here, which kind of mirrors the WCOOP with a lot of similar events. This is the sixth year of the ICOOP, in fact.
In 2011 I won a bracelet in the very first ICOOP event that year, a €200 NLHE event for which I won about €65,000. I’m still looking for my second ICOOP bracelet, and this year’s series is shaping up to be bigger than ever. There are 40 events altogether with guaranteed prize pools totaling more than €3 million.
We’ve also launched the new Spin & Gos here in Italyl. We were the second country to do so after Spain introduced them. I’ve started playing them just to get acquainted with the format, and I enjoyed them enough to have played about 3,000 of them — a pretty decent-sized sample to test them. I like the fact that they are playable on mobile devices and are great for casual players who are just looking to jump into a quick game.
There’s a lot of poker happening here in southern Europe, with lots of action on the live and virtual felt.
Pier Paolo Fabretti is a member of Team PokerStars Pro.
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