$2 Million Guaranteed and 3 Million Guaranteed Irish Open means biggest ever month on paddypowerpoker.com

The Poker-Made Millionaire is an elite group of 84 players and growing who have won at least $1 million playing on the World Poker Tour. As the representative of the group, Antonio Esfandiari will provide poker tips, tools and tricks for fans and players while delivering updates and information from tournament stops.

Esfandiari will also represent the WPT in tournaments and events across the world, including the upcoming WPT tournament at Casino Barcelona in May, which is the first of many regional events WPT will implement in various markets worldwide.

“Antonio embodies the excitement that has become the WPT journey,” said Steve Lipscomb, WPT founder, president and CEO.

“This is the only sport in the history of televised sports that allows you to watch it, dream it and be it. Now WPT fans and poker enthusiasts can take the journey with Antonio as he leads the way for the next WPT Poker-Made Millionaire.”

When Esfandiari was 25 years old, he became the sixth player to achieve WPT Poker-Made Millionaire status. He did so by winning $1.4 million in the Season 2 L.A. Poker Classic.

At the time, he was the youngest million-dollar prize winner. He followed up that win with a final-table appearance at the WPT Celebrity Invitational, where he placed sixth.

This isn’t the first time Esfandiari has been hired by the WPT either. He once won a contract to stage a magic show during a press release party for the company.

“I will never forget the day Steve Lipscomb hired me to perform magic at the press release party for the WPT. All I dreamt of that day was winning a WPT event someday,” said Esfandiari.

“To have actually won a few years later and to now become the official spokesperson for a company that did so much for poker and me personally is an honor I hold very dear to me. It’s great to be a part of the WPT, [which] has been such an instrumental part of my poker journey.”

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I’m sure we’ve all been there (though I suppose I’m not sure, or I wouldn’t be posting the thread ). You’ve bought a game, taken it home, put it on your console, and something about it has really disappointed you.

Maybe it didn’t look how you expected it to. Maybe it was a poor arcade conversion. Maybe it was missing a glaringly obvious feature that you expected to be included, or perhaps it’s just a bit crap.

To me this usually only happens with impulse-buys, as it did recently.

On my recent visit back to the UK, I wanted to grab some English PSP games, as where you can get them here, they’re ridiculously marked up in price. I got several; Football Manager Portable (seems good, for 4 quid I can’t complain) and Ridge Racer (another quality entry in the series), but the game I’m talking about here is Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Not long after its release, I braved a Japanese version of Monster Hunter 2, but soon gave up on it as the Japanese text is extensive and crucial to playing the game - as I knew it was getting at least an American release sooner or later. Somewhere in between trading that in, and buying the UK version on PSP on an impulse last week, I was certain I’d heard that the Western version of the game would have a bona-fide online mode, rather than just local multiplayer, like the PS2 version that preceded the PSP incarnations. In Japan it’s had a recent re-release with the suffix of “-G”, so I assumed that it was a re-release with this added feature (which is pretty common here).

I might be alone in thinking this, but I’ve tended to find that for PSP games, which usually don’t allow game-sharing, local multiplayer is pretty useless. I know few people with PSPs, but fewer still that would rate “to use the multiplayer” as one of their justifications in buying a game - and it isn’t like MHF2 has universal appeal. As a result, I tend to find designing a PSP game that hinges on local multiplayer to be something that really doesn’t appeal.

So essentially what I’ve got is Phantasy Star Offline, given the obvious similarities the game has to PSO. The reason I complain is that the game seems REALLY good, and I have no doubt in multiplayer it’d be superb - it has a really clever weapons system and the combat strategy seems really geared towards the multiplayer, but as it is, it’s just dull.

My secondmost has to be Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance 2 coming out, and not having 4-player multiplayer. Several magazines did publish info stating it was 4-player before release; either the feature was removed before it went gold or they were merely mixing it up with the contemporary 4-player Dungeons & Dragons Heroes game, which was similar.

What gaming purchase disapppointments have you had?