Popular comedian Norm Macdonald appeared in a video this week to promote the offshore online poker room, Americas Cardroom.

Sporting an ACR jersey, the Canadian-born stand-up comedian and former host of High Stakes Poker went on for over 15 minutes heaping praise on the site (which you can watch below).

Macdonald has plenty of ties to the poker community including being the headlining act in the first ever PokerStars Comedy Night in The Bahamas earlier this year.

Oddly, Macdonald touted the transparency of the site as one of its best and distinguishing qualities. Now keep in mind this is the same site where a bot was exposed heads up in a tournament on a Twitch stream earlier this year, and while CEO Phil Nagy has vowed to clean up the site and rid it of bots, that wasn’t the first time we heard that kind of talk out pf Nagy over the years.

More recently, the room issued a press release claiming that it set a new GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ title for the largest cryptocurrency winning jackpot in an online poker tournament, but at the time of writing, the Guinness site doesn’t reflect the record.

PokerStars has revealed the dates for its most prestigious online tournament series—the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP).

It will run for 21 days from September 5 to 25.

Other details including overall guarantees have not been revealed by the operator, but based on its growth trend over the past few years, this year’s WCOOP could see total guarantees between $85 million to $90 million.

Last year, WCOOP 2018 had guaranteed $70 million across 182 events. Despite this apparently ambitious target, it easily covered most guarantees and paid out almost $100 million across the series.

Like last year, PokerStars has confirmed that this year’s Main Event will come with both a Low and High tier ($5200 buy-in).

Online qualifiers will take place from August 19.

More details are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

Heard your favorite pro obliquely reference something called PioSolver on Twitter, but too afraid to ask? Downloaded it once but found it so obtuse you ALT-F4’d and never dared open it again?

Well, now you can GTO solve like the best of them with this great pair of videos that walk you through how to use the tool to analyze a couple of really interesting hands from the WSOP Main Event.

In video one, Mr AceSixOfDiamonds, who goes by Furples on Reddit where he first shared them, breaks down his play from Day 1C of the Main Event.

In his second vid he takes you through a KQ hand from Day 2 of the Main.

We found them both really instructive, as it is always interesting to see a strong player pilot a powerful, yet complex tool, and talk through his process.

He promises to make more vids, so be sure to give him a subscribe on YouTube to get notified of more. We’re not quite sure who Furples is IRL – we’re guessing this is his 2+2 profile. If anyone know’s his Twitter handle, please point him this way, and tell him we say thanks!

The WSOP is over. You’re sat at home, whiling away the time. The WSOP is over, so there’s no more great live poker to stream. What do you do?

You watch some live-streaming Scrabble, that’s what.

The North American Scrabble Championship is happening right now in Reno, Nevada. The country’s top Scrabble players are playing some high stakes hot tile action as we speak. And the lovely folks at GGsLive are live-streaming all the action.

Never watched a Scrabble live-stream before? Well honestly, neither had we, but we found it oddly compelling—and we bet if you like watching live poker, you might like this too. Here’s what to expect:

• “Hole card” cam of both players’ til racks (bonus: watch players rearrange their tiles to spell rude words!)
• Ace commentary from two top Scrabble players in the box
• A smart board camera that swivels when the board does
• Over-the-board analysis from engine-recommended moves
• Probably lots more in this all-day stream

The above embed is from yesterday’s mammoth seven-hour day. The fine folks over at GGS have also split it into shorter videos of individual games.

We expect them to be back in just a few hours to stream the final day’s action. They didn’t get a lot of attention yesterday, so let’s show them some love and all tune in. We’ll embed the main channel stream, hopefully this will show Thursday’s action when it starts.

The MPN Poker Tour in London may have come to a close this past weekend but there is still plenty to look forward too from the online poker network.

Scheduled to run in September from the 15th to 29th of the month, MPN will bring back the Universal Championship of Online Poker (UCOP).

There will be €1 million guaranteed and a slate of 94 events is expected in what will be the biggest yet from the network.

Low and mid-stakes tournaments will be on offer and players will be able to enter UCOP from MPN skins that include likes of 32Red, Guts, Paf Poker and BetSafe.

You can check out a guide to the best uk casinos here if you are still looking for the best places to play online poker and other games online.

For those players wanting to check out the other casino games, rather that poker, Microgaming, who owns MPN, has launched the Magic of Sahara online slots.

“Conjured up with lavish art and music, the game’s enchanting atmosphere invites players into a desert wonderland filled with stacked wilds, free spins and a Token Chain feature,” it says in the Magic of Sahara press release. “Casting a spell during the base game are valuable super stacked wilds, which can materialise on reels three and four, invoking magical rewards.”

For those wanting to try their hand at Magic of Sahara, players will be awarded five extra free spins during a “free spin round.”