April fools the poker community

Rest of the World
04/03/2019

As serious as poker can be, when April 1st comes around we often get surprised by the creativity of the April Fools jokes in the poker community. 2019 was no different. Here are some highlights of this year’s April 1st.

Blom’s Bankroll Management course on Upswing Poker

Poker’s biggest troll Doug Polk had a field day. He tweeted about a series of new courses that will be offered on his poker coaching site Upswing Poker and started with a Bankroll Management course by the notorious splasher Viktor Blom:

But that was not all. Polk had a go at Allen Kessler (“Big Stack Poker”), Doc Sands (“Acting Quickly”), Phil Hellmuth (“Tilt Control”), Daniel Negreanu (“Conveying Information”), PokerStars, Will Kassouf and many more including Doug Polk himself (“How to dress for success”).

The poker Twitter community gobbled up this trolling festival with hundreds of “Likes” for each post.

and Team “Carve It Up”

Run It Up entered the social media sphere on April 1st with a post about hand-crafted wooden J’s that could be ordered from the store as personalised editions.

“Buy your personalized J and join Team Carve It Up!”

PokerStrategy report on a PokerStars’ new variant Fusion Split Showtime Spin & Gos

split

And PokerStars got in on the joke.

PokerStrategy published an article announcing a new PokerStars variant and as it turned out, PokerStars liked the idea and actually added a freeroll including $5,500 in prizes (Mainly Sunday Million buy-ins) to “celebrate the launch” – it was standard Hold’em however.

£1 million Super Short Deck Triton event

Probably the most believable April Fools joke came from Triton Poker. They announced to be “pushing the boundaries of innovation” by offering a Super Short Deck event at the upcoming Triton Series Montenegro that would only include 20 cards per deck, tens through to aces.

Triton

In addition to that the buy-in of £1 million would become the biggest buy-in tournament in televised poker history, beating the €1 million buy-in at the “Big One for One Drop” event in Monte Carlo 2016.

Triton had announced in the past that they would beat this record soon and the poker community had waited for the news to come. This made this April Fools joke so elaborate, and don’t we all actually wish it was true anyway?

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Chaar-Lee discovered poker over 20 years ago, starting with fixed-limit games before embracing the rise of No-Limit Hold’em across cash games, STTs, and MTTs. In the early days, he and his circle sometimes played more than 40 different formats in a single night. He organized the first poker camp in his region and has contributed poker technology to several televised shows. Today, he supports the SOMUCHPOKER team from the tech side, blending two decades of poker passion with technical expertise.