Caesars Entertainment Corporation released the official schedule for the 2012 World Series of Poker (WSOP) today, proudly listing a lineup of 61 bracelet events across 50 days. The festival kicks off Sunday, May 27th with the traditional opening tournament, the $500 Casino Employees No-Limit Hold’em event, with the first open bracelet event, $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em, beginning the following day. Poker action will take place every day through July 16th, at which point the Main Event final table will be determined and the tournament will break until October.

That’s right, October. The WSOP tweeted yesterday that the November Nine was no more, but that was simply a case of them just messing with the minds of the poker community. The November Nine still exists; it is simply moved to October this year to make way for the U.S. Presidential Election in November. The final nine players will play down to two on Sunday, October 28th and the heads-up match will be contested on Tuesday, October 30th.

The World Poker Tour (WPT) released its Season X television schedule Wednesday, circling February 12th as the jump-off point for the series. The first episode, along with all subsequent episodes, will air at both 8:00pm and 11:00pm local time.

The season, which will once again be broadcast on Fox Sports Net (FSN), will consist of 37 episodes, up 11 from Season IX. Part of the change is an increase in the number of episodes per tournament; the story of each tour stop will now be told across three episodes instead of just two. Strong ratings were likely another catalyst for the added episodes, as ratings increased 30 percent from Season VIII to Season IX.

It looks as if Black Friday has struck again, as the long-running televised poker cash-game, High Stakes Poker, will see its run on the Game Show Network come to an end. The site is reporting that the network’s January lineup does not feature the popular poker telecast after January 2nd, 2012, ending a six-year run on the network.

A number of poker shows have been cancelled in the wake of Black Friday, including the PokerStars Big Game and the NBC Heads-Up Poker Championship, as the tremendous amount of advertising revenue from Full Tilt poker and PokerStars has been pulled from these programs.

If you are going to win a World Poker Tour (WPT) event, you might as well do it on a whim.  Such was essentially the case for James “Flushy” Dempsey Sunday night, as he won the 2011 WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic.  The Brit was not in Las Vegas specifically to play in the prestigious tournament at the Bellagio, but rather to pick up some money as a favor to friend and fellow poker player Chris Moorman.  In the process, he picked up $821,612 of his own after beating one of the toughest final tables in recent memory.

While Dempsey was in good shape going into final table play with 3.86 million chips, he was staring up at 2010 November Niner Soi Nguyen, who was over a million chips ahead. Just behind Dempsey was online star Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger, who had already amassed around $1.4 million in live tournament earnings, including $500,000 from an 18th place finish in the 2009 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event. Next was Vanessa Selbst, holder of two North American Poker Tour (NAPT) titles, a Partouche Poker Tour crown, a WSOP final table, and a 3rd place finish in the 2007 WSOP $5,000 Heads-Up No-Limit Hold’em event. Then there was Antonio Esfandiari with 1.255 million chips. You know, a poker nobody. He only won this event last year to go along with another WPT title from 2004 and had won about $4.5 million in live tournaments worldwide. Bringing up the year was Vitor Coelho with 560,000 chips.  Coelho was coming off a 4th place finish at WPT Jacksonville.