The PokerStars Latin American Poker Tour announced its schedule for Season Three and there’s a new addition to the schedule that isn’t so new: the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. The $10,000 buy-in event has previously been a part of the World Poker Tour and European Poker Tour.

The LAPT will feature five events this year with the first event, the $2,500 LAPT Playa Conchal, being held November 19 - 22 in Costa Rica. After taking December off the LAPT will start 2010 in grand fashion at the Atlantis Bahamas with the PCA from January 4 - 14.

“I’m really happy that the tour will take in the PCA event in The Bahamas - it’s one of my favorite tournaments of the year - it’s got everything; with over 50 poker events and fun activities in the sun for friends and family,” said Andre Akkari, PokerStars pro.

From the Bahamas the LAPT moves to Uruguay for the $3,500 Punta del Este from February 24 - 27. The next stop is in Chile as Vina del Mar runs from March 20 - 23.

‘In just two seasons, the Latin American Poker Tour has become the biggest poker tour in the region. It attracts the best players from Latin America and all over the world,” said PokerStars pro and Costa Rican native Humberto Brenes. ”Last season, the prize pool hit a million dollars in Costa Rica and I know we’re going to beat that this time! I am very proud to play in Costa Rica – it’s my home country and a very special event for me.”

The final stop on the schedule has yet to have dates solidified. The LAPT Grand Final will have a $5,000 buy-in and be held in Argentina.

Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the entire internet for all the latest news in and around the world of poker. If it involves chips and cards, or people known to associate with chips and cards, we’re there.

Mandalay Media tenders last-minute offer for World Poker Tour

The World Poker Tour Enterprises Board of Directors was all set to vote today on a $12.3 million offer tendered by PartyGaming subsidiary Peerless Media to buy the majority of the WPT’s assets, but a last-minute offer from Mandalay Media worth $36.5 million has the Board putting on the brakes and considering the new deal.

The Peerless Media offer was actually the second offer the WPT received in August and represented a 33% increase over the previous offer from Gamynia Limited for $9.08 million. Now WPT has a suitor who not only wants to pay four times the original deal, but also wants to offer “significant cash and stock” to WPTE shareholders where the previous offers had nothing for them. As our good friends at Wicked Chops Poker noted yesterday:

Damn. That’s a quick turnaround for a company many felt was running on fumes a year ago. Hats off to Lipscomb and crew.

Mandalay Media has asked to meet with the WPTE Board of Directors as soon as possible, so there should be more coming on this story in the very near future.

(Mandalay Media Announces Proposal to Acquire World Poker Tour - Reuters)

Annette_15 gets first taste of live US poker

At the age of 18, Annette “Annette_15” Obrestad became the youngest WSOP bracelet winner ever when she took down the inaugural WSOP Europe Main Event in 2007, hitting a milestone that’s going to be difficult. Now Obrestad has reached another milestone: she’s played her first game of live tournament poker in Las Vegas.

Obrestad let the world know last week on her Twitter feed that she would be appearing on her first episode of Poker After Dark. Yesterday she got to work, and in the finest PAD tradition there were no soft spots at the table; Obrestad’s opposition includes Mike Matusow, Antonio Esfandiari, Erick Lindgren, Phil Laak, and 11-time bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth. There’s no word yet on the results, or on when the episode is set to air.

Originally the Norwegian poker prodigy was going to play the Festa al Lago main event at Bellagio. However, her wire transfer didn’t go through in time and she didn’t want to borrow money from anybody, so she sat the tournament out instead.

You can follow Miss Obrestad’s Twitter feed here, or check out the rest of our Poker Tweets page here.

PCA switches tours, again

After announcing the first stop of its third season a few weeks ago, PokerStars finally released the rest of the Latin American Poker Tour schedule for 2009-10 - and one of poker’s biggest tournaments is being added to the mix.

Season Three of the LAPT will sport five tournaments in all, starting in November 19th in Playa Conchal, Costa Rica, and ending with the LAPT Grand Final at an as-yet-undetermined location in Argentina. In between the tour will hit familiar stops in Chile and Uruguay, but not before detouring to the Bahamas in January for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.

The PCA is already a virtual lock to break every record set thus far in the LAPT’s two years of existence, since it sports both the largest buy-in ($10,300) and the largest field-size cap (1,600) on this year’s tour. Placing one of the most popular tournaments on the annual worldwide tournament calendar in the middle of the LAPT schedule also adds some extra credibility to a young tour in one of poker’s most promising emerging markets; the 11-day PCA is the largest poker festival in the world outside Las Vegas.

This is officially the third tour that the PCA has called home. It started off as a World Poker Tour stop before the WPT ended it ties to online poker rooms after passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The European Poker Tour then hosted the PCA for the next two years, giving Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier the chance to pad his EPT career stars with a $2 million win in 2008.

More info on the new Latin American Poker Tour schedule is available at the tour’s official website.

India set to legalize online gambling

The Indian state of Sikkim is accepting bid for three online gambling licenses which would give outside companies a foothold in an Indian gambling market worth an estimated $60 billion.

The companies who win the licenses will only be able to promote their services in the Himalayan state, which has a population of just 600,000 people, but apparently they will be able to take bets from all over India, which has a total population of 1.2 billion. Sikkim is just one of two states in the entire country where casino gambling is legal; the other is Goa, where the now-defunct Asian Poker Classic took place a few years back.

Indian law requires that foreign companies partner with a local company in a joint venture. That means that outifts like William Hill, Betfair, Bwin, 888, and Ladbrokes who are interested in the licenses will have to find a company from Sikkim to come along for the ride as well. The market seems ripe for exploitation at this point: legal operators in Goa and Sikkim combine to give the Indian government revenues of $400 million per year, while possible revenues from the current black market are estimated to be in the $2 billion range.

The government in Sikkim is expected to announce who will receive the licenses at some point in the next two weeks.

(Betfair and William Hill target India - The Independent)

BLUFF Latin America will now publish BLUFF Brasil

BLUFF Media, the publishers of BLUFF Magazine, this week announced the launch of BLUFF Brasil for the Portugese-speaking market in Brazil and the rest of South America. The new magazine will be managed by the same group that controls BLUFF Latin America.

“We are so pleased with the new BLUFF Brasil , it is such an important market and one that it’s close to the heart,” said Reinaldo Venegas, Editor of BLUFF Latin America. ”Brazil is not only the biggest country in Latin America. It is an incredibly unique place of such cultural richness and diversity, key to the progress of the whole region and a power to be reckoned in sports, cradle to some of the best poker players in the world.”

BLUFF Brasil will feature articles from BLUFF Magazine translated into “easy Portugese” as well as a full complement of articles written by some of Brazil’s top poker players. Team PokerStars Pro Maridu Mayrinck, World Series of Poker bracelet winner Alexandre Gomes and Andre Akkari will all contribute to the magazine.

“The aforementioned success of BLUFF Latin America and the professionalism of its crew have earned the franchise the label of Official Magazine for the Latin American Poker Tour,” said Venegas. “Such distinction is one we are very proud of and our readers should expect the same high standards for BLUFF Brasil.”

The new magazine joins other geo-centric BLUFF products BLUFF Europe, BLUFF South Africa, BLUFF Australasia and BLUFF Latin America as BLUFF Media continues to expand the marketing reach of what is already the world’s largest poker publication.

Karl Evroy took home the LAPT Punta Del Este this weekend in Uruguay.

The Latin American Poker Tour expanded its collection of international champions to include a Scandinavian this weekend when Karl Hevroy won the tour’s latest stop in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

A 20-year-old student from Bergen, Norway, Hevroy hadn’t even planned to play the event. But at the insistence of a group of Peruvian players he’d met earlier this year at EPT Copenhagen he signed up, a decision that turned out to be worth $283,500.

The event, hosted by the Mantra Resort and Casino in Punta del Este, drew 327 players. At $1.1 million, the prize pool was the largest in the tour’s brief history thanks to solid turnout and a higher-than-normal $3,700 buy-in.

Hevroy sat back in the early going before opening up a can of run good on his opponents and running away with the tournament. First Oliver Rowe flopped a set of threes and got his entire stack in the middle, only to leave in fifth place ($59,960) when the Norwegian’s K-Q hit a gutshot straight on the river. Ron Wasiel went next in fourth place ($82,160), moving in with J-9 on a T-T-9 flop and running into Hevroy’s J-J.

Angel Guillen had the best shot at changing Hevroy’s championship-bound trajectory, getting his entire stack in the middle preflop with A-J to Hevroy’s A-T on the last hand before the dinner break. But the Norwegian again found a way to win with the worst of it when the board came Q-T-6-6-7 and sent Guillen home in third place ($99,120).

In the end Hevroy would need only the first hand after dinner to seal his victory. Alejandro De Arruabarrena limped from the button with Q-J and got aggressive at precisely the wrong time: his Q-J was drawing nearly dead on the 9-9-8 flop against Hevroy’s 9-8. The Argentinian’s 0.81% chance of winning was dashed when the turn brought neither a queen nor a jack, clinching the win for Hevroy. De Arruabarrena settled for the consolation prize of $155,420.

“I’m so happy, I don’t feel like I know anything,” the champion said afterward. “I had a few moments where I was in danger, and then I luckboxed my way out.”

Hevroy and the rest of the season’s LAPT champions will return to action one final time next month at the LAPT Grand Final in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Maria Mayrinck has joined Team PokerStars Pro after signing her contract earlier this week.

The PokerStars-sponsored Latin American Poker Tour’s cancelled Season 2 Mexico event has finally crowned a champion. If you missed the story the first time around, that tournament was shut down last December by local government authorities on the second day of a planned three-day event and the prize pool was distributed among the 89 players who still had chips. As a gesture of goodwill to its players, the online poker room staged a freeroll early this year for those players in which they started with the same number of chips they had left when the live event was cancelled. Yesterday the final nine players from the online freeroll flew to the Uruguayan luxury resort town of Punta del Este to play a televised final table with a $50,000 prize pool.

The winner of the LAPT Nuevo Vallarta title was 26-year-old Rory Cox of Lexington, Va. On his way to the title Cox had to make it past Team PokerStars pro Victor Ramdin and Costa Rica’s three-time LAPT final tablist, Alex Brenes. After defeating fellow American Helen Prager in heads-up play, Cox walked away with $15,000 of the $50,000 prize pool.

When the final table was concluded PokerStars announced that it will hold a second freeroll tournament, this time open to all players who attended LAPT Nueva Vallarta last year, regardless of whether they played in the main event, second chance event, or side events. The final ten players in the freeroll, to be held April 4-5, will win a full package for this season’s LAPT Grand Final in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

“We know that many of our players travelled to Mexico to play the full schedule of events, not just the main event,” said Sarne Lightman, Director of Marketing for PokerStars Latin America. “As these events were also cancelled we want to offer any players who attended LAPT Nuevo Vallarta a chance to qualify for what will be our biggest and most exciting LAPT yet.”

In more Latin American news for the world’s largest online poker room, Maria “Maridu” Mayrinck has joined its roster of Team PokerStars pros. Mayrinck, a popular blogger from Brazil, cashed three times at the 2008 WSOP and will be looking to add to that total this year as a sponsored player. “I guarantee on my end that I will always do my best to honor the name of the best poker site on the planet, which I respect so much,” Mayrinck said of her newly official affiliation. “I am very aware of the great privilege this is and I won’t take any of it for granted.”

Sure, the entire world might seem to be focused on the Super Bowl in Tampa but online poker room BodogLife.com has come up with two special poker tournaments that will give poker players a much needed distraction during Super Bowl weekend.

The first is a $125 + $10 buy-in Flight Club Seminfinal that will award one seat to the LAPT Punta del Esta for every 48 players who register. The $6,000 prize package includes the $3,700 buy-in plus $2,300 for travel and accomodation costs. The tournament starts at 4 pm ET on Saturday afternoon.

Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, Bodog will host its Super Bowl Special tournament with $20,000 in added prize money. The $100 + $9 buy-in event starts a good two hours before the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals kick-off in the actual game so you’ve got plenty of time to build up a monster stack and get some of that $20,000.

For more information or to sign-up visit BodogLife.com.

As of Friday morning Argentia’s Fabian Ortiz has become two things; first, he’s $141,426 richer and second, he’s the first ever Latin American poker player to win a Latin American Poker Tour title event after he bested a field of 216 poker players to win the LAPT Vina Del Mar in Chile at the EnjoyVina del Mar Casino and Resort.

Ortiz eliminated Vincenzo Gianelli of Venuzuela to win the title. Gianelli took home $78,570 for finishing as the runner-up. The final table at actually had all nine players from Latin America with local favourite Jyries Saba finishing seventh for $18,330. Saba was one of 50 players from Chile to play in the event.

“Fabian Ortiz’s win demonstrates the growth of poker as a Latin American sport”, said LAPT President Glenn Cademartori. “This is our first event where the majority of the field was made up of Latin American players. We expect many more local champions as this sport continues to grow in popularity in the region.”

The next LAPT stop is the Punta del Este scheduled for the Mantra Resort Spa Casino in Uruguay this March.

LAPT Vina Del Mar Final Table Payouts

1. Fabian Ortiz - $141,426
2. Vincenzo Gianelli - $78,570
3. Damian Salas - $52,380
4. Leandro Balotin - $39,285
5. Hernan Villa - $28,809
6. Fabio Escobar - $23,571
7. Jyries Saba - $18,330
8. Eduardo Camia - $13,095
9. Jaime Ateneloff - $10,476