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PokerStars unveiled David Lappin as the newest member of Team PokerStars Pro at EPT Paris on Wednesday. The move closed out the 2025 PokerStars Live League and came with a €100,000 ambassador contract for 2026.

The Live League is a year-long contest that awards points for results across PokerStars live events. The top 10 finishers on the High, Medium and Low leaderboards entered a selection process, and a PokerStars panel picked Lappin from the final group. He finished 10th on the Low leaderboard after cashing in Campione, Manchester, Malaga, the Irish Open and EPT Malta. Lappin later told Pokerfuse that he had finished tenth and submitted a short video as part of the audition.

Lappin said the jump from competing in the league to representing PokerStars was a huge honor. He said ambassadors should represent players rather than just a brand, and that he wants to listen, answer questions and help improve live events. Cédric Billot said Lappin has deep roots in live poker and a voice players listen to, which made him a natural fit.

Earlier coverage said he and Dara O’Kearney left after objecting to WPT Global’s decision to sign Ren Lin as an ambassador, with the split tied to concerns about game integrity. PokerNews also noted that Lappin said PokerStars had accounted for around half of his live events in recent years.

PokerNews reported in January that PokerStars brought the Live League back for 2026 as a standalone season-long race across European live events, including EPT festivals, PokerStars Opens and the Irish Open. The new edition offers more than €250,000 in prizes, and the rules were tweaked to put more weight on final-table appearances and tournament wins than in 2025. Buy-in bands were also adjusted so €1,000 to €1,200 events count toward both the Low and Medium leaderboards, while €4,900 to €5,500 events count for both Medium and High.

Octopi Poker has brought Thomas Boivin in as both Head of Content and Head of Octopi Academy.

According to Poker.org, Octopi and Boivin pitched the academy as an attempt to revolutionize poker coaching through content. Boivin described it as the new branch of Octopi Poker where the learning “revolution” would happen, built around gamification, leaderboards, quizzes, trainers and drills as part of a holistic system.

He also said Octopi had the highest ambition in the coaching space and that poker coaching had been much the same for years. Victoria Livschitz said she wanted to reinvent the whole thing, and that Boivin was her number one choice to help build the academy from scratch.

As covered in July, Octopi had already relaunched Boivin’s Beyond The Solver as a self-paced course after revising the syllabus and adding new material. The updated version was available for $999, and the course offered 11 blueprints.

Cardplayer Lifestyle noted that Boivin already had coaching experience through his French platform PurePoker. It also traced a résumé that began in 2011, with a 2016 MSPT Main Event win in Las Vegas for $352,000, a 2017 Aussie Millions 6-max title for $88,000, and a 2025 that produced 32 cashes, 18 final tables, two runner-up finishes, two titles and $8.4 million in winnings. Poker.org put his 2025 tally at more than $8 million, with three seven-figure cashes totaling more than $5.5 million, enough for 18th place on The Hendon Mob’s 2025 Money List.

Boivin’s first Octopi Academy course is Beyond the Solver: 15 Blueprints to Exploit Common Population Mistakes.

Andrew Shelton turned a $550 buy-in into a $1 million windfall at the WSOP Mini Mystery Millions, landing the event’s top Gold Chest bounty in a field of 20,488 entries.

PokerNews reported that the million-dollar bounty stayed hidden deep into the day before Shelton finally found it. It took 43 players drawing from the Gold Chest before the $1 million bounty was pulled, and by 6pm players had a 1-in-8 shot at the prize if they pulled a gold chest.

The scale of the event was huge even before Shelton’s pull. The tournament generated a $9.35 million prize pool, with $4.10 million set aside for the bounty pool, and the 793 players who returned for Day 2 had already locked up at least $1,160 each.

Shelton also finished 102nd in the tournament for another $3,350. He later said the score would pretty much double his net worth, and described himself as a recreational player who manages property outside poker.

His reaction was as loose as it was honest. According to Poker.org, Shelton said he never thought he would win that much money, called the moment “f***ing wild,” and told reporters, “Oh no, I’m f***ing partying.” According to PokerNews, he also said he did not plan to grind many more tournaments, adding that one World Series of Poker event a year is already too much grind.

The $50,000 Poker Players Championship got down to 15 players on Day 3, with Benny Glaser finishing in front at 4,705,000 chips after edging Paul Volpe. The event, often called the mixed-games Main Event, drew 108 entries and built a $5,130,000 prize pool, with $1,343,764 reserved for the winner.

Only 39 players came back to the feature stage area to start Day 3, and the field was already down to 24 by dinner. Early exits included Yuri Dzivielevski, Jared Bleznick, Gus Hansen and Brian Rast, the last former champion still alive in the event. James Tilton's Razz loss to Maksim Pisarenko set the final five tables.

PokerNews reported that the money bubble turned into a marathon, lasting 47 hands before it finally burst. Bryce Yockey became the bubble boy when he was forced all-in from the big blind and fell to Nick Guagenti, leaving him with 15,000 chips, less than a third of a big blind.

Robert Wells had the roughest near-miss, going out two spots before the money in 7-Card Stud after starting with rolled-up trip sixes against Roy Thung and Paul Volpe. Volpe got Thung to fold on fifth street, then filled up with jacks and eights when an 8 on sixth street ended Wells' run. Dara Taherpour locked up the min-cash at $100,934, while Matt Glantz followed out with $102,474.

Phil Ivey and Phil Hellmuth both survived to Day 4, and the two Phils now have 28 bracelets between them. Ivey ended the night with the seventh-largest stack, while Hellmuth was second-shortest on 545,000. The title has still eluded both, even though Ivey is back at the final table for his record sixth time cashing the event and PokerOrg later said Glaser had stretched his lead to 8,610,000 chips heading into the final table.

New South Wales has unveiled a wide gambling reform package that targets both harm reduction and marketing limits. The plan covers a statewide exclusion register, mandatory facial recognition at gaming-room entrances, third-party exclusions, tighter ad rules, a ban on VIP gaming programs, and a push toward account-based play.

According to a NSW government ministerial release, the package was presented as delivering on a key election commitment and was shaped by the state’s Independent Panel for Gaming Reform, along with input from industry, harm minimisation groups, stakeholders and privacy experts. The government also said it is responding to findings in several reports, including the Roadmap for Gaming Reform and a Crime Commission inquiry into money laundering through electronic gaming machines in hotels and clubs.

The state said it will invest $95.2 million over four years to implement the changes, with an extra $20 million going to the Responsible Gambling Fund over the next two years. The release cited the NSW Gambling Survey 2024, which found 3.1% of adults were experiencing moderate-risk gambling and 0.9% were experiencing high-risk gambling.

The biggest structural change is the statewide exclusion register. It is meant to replace a fragmented system where self-exclusion was handled venue by venue and enforcement often depended on staff memory and manual checks.

Under the new plan, exclusions will be backed by mandatory facial recognition at the entry to gaming rooms. The register will cover every hotel and club with gaming machines, and the system is due to be introduced in 2028.

A third-party exclusion scheme will also be added. That gives family members, friends, venues and police more ways to trigger exclusions for people considered at risk, including cases linked to criminal activity.

The package also aims to shrink the machine footprint over time. NSW currently has about 87,000 poker machines across 2,100 clubs and hotels, and the forfeiture rate when gaming machine entitlements are traded will rise from one in three to one in two, so one entitlement is removed for every two that change hands.

A sinking cap will lower the statewide ceiling on entitlements as they are withdrawn from circulation. The government said it is also working toward account-based play and will upgrade the Central Monitoring System over the next two years to support that shift, while acknowledging that much of the current machine infrastructure still relies on legacy technology.

Marketing rules are being tightened too. Gambling advertising will no longer be allowed on NSW government or local council-owned assets, betting service providers will need express consent before direct marketing by phone, email or text, and affiliates and influencers will face new transparency rules with commission limits on higher-risk products. The package also bans VIP programs tied to gaming and promises a state strategy to address online gambling harm, alongside tougher penalties for illegal operators.