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Latin
America
News
Fabian
Ortiz is First Latin American LAPT Champion, by
Dan Cypra -
23rd January 2009
There
was $141,426 on the line in the PokerStars Latin
American Poker Tour (LAPT) Viña del Mar
event, held in Chile. Players from 27 countries
around the world descended on the South American
casino and, in the end, Fabian Ortiz became the
first Latin American champion in LAPT history.
He hails from Chaco, which PokerStars describes
as a “rural province” in Argentina.
The
Main Event at Vina del Mar had a buy-in of $2,700
along with a second chance tournament that sported
a $1,100 price tag. It was the LAPT’s first
tournament since the event in Mexico ended abruptly
with federal agents descending on the tournament
area late last year. The Viña del Mar event
saw 50 Chileans enter and the entire final table
consisted of players from across Latin and South
America.
LAPT
President Glenn Cademartori commented in a press
release distributed by PokerStars on Friday, “Fabian
Ortiz’s win demonstrates the growth of poker
as a Latin American sport. This is our first event
where the majority of the field was made up of
Latin American players. We expect many more local
champions as this sport continues to grow in popularity
in the region.”
Team
PokerStars Pro members Humberto Brenes, who hails
from Costa Rica, and Andre Akkari, who resides
in Brazil, made their way to Viña del Mar.
However, neither sponsored pro made the final
table, which in the end shook out as follows:
1st
Place: Fabian Ortiz (Argentina), $141,426
2nd Place: Vincenzo Gianelli (Venezuela), $78,570
3rd Place: Damian Salas (Argentina), $52,380
4th Place: Leandro Balotin (Brazil), $39,285
5th Place: Hernan Villa (Colombia), $28,809
6th Place: Fabio Escobar (Brazil), $23,571
7th Place: Jyries Saba (Chile), $18,330
8th Place: Eduardo Camia (Argentina), $13,095
9th Place: Jaime Ateneloff (Uruguay), $10,476
Next
up for the LAPT is a stop in Punta del Este, Uruguay
at the Mantra Resort spa and Casino. The $3,700
Main Event kicks off on March 18th and a winner
will be crowned two days later. A second chance
tournament has a $1,100 buy-in. The feature tournament
is capped at 500 players and the second chance
can accomodate a maximum of 300. Mar de Plata
in Argentina will host the season-end event in
April. No official dates for the tournament have
been announced.
PokerStars
is fresh off holding the largest live poker tournament
ever held outside of the United States. The most
recent PokerStars Caribbean Adventure drew 1,347
players and awarded a first place prize of $3
million, which went to Poorya Nazari. The Canadian
defeated American Tony Gregg heads-up. (Credit:
Poker News Daily).
Profile
Latin
America (Spanish: América Latina or Latinoamérica;
Portuguese: América Latina; French: Amérique
latine) is the region of the Americas where Romance
languages (i.e., those derived from Latin), particularly
Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French, are
primarily spoken.
Definition
In
most common contemporary usage, Latin America
refers only to those territories in the Americas
where the Spanish or Portuguese languages prevail:
Mexico, most of Central and South America, plus
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico
in the Caribbean.
More literally speaking, Latin America can designate
all of those countries and territories in the
Americas where a Romance language (i.e. languages
derived from Latin, and hence the name of the
region) is spoken: Spanish, Portuguese, and French,
and creole languages based upon these. Indeed,
this was the original intent when the term was
popularized by Napoleon III as part of his campaign
to imply cultural kinship with France and install
Maximilian as emperor of Mexico[5].
Using this definition, Latin America includes
not only all Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries,
but also the current and former French territories
in the hemisphere, including Quebec in Canada;
Louisiana in the United States; Haiti, Martinique
and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; French Guiana
in South America; and St. Pierre and Miquelon
near Newfoundland.
Often, particularly in the United States, the
term may be used to refer to all of the Americas
south of the U.S., including such countries as
Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago,
Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Dominica,
Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the
Bahamas where English prevails.
The former Dutch colony Suriname, the Netherlands
Antilles, and Aruba are not usually considered
part of Latin America, although in the latter
two, a predominantly Iberian-derived creole language,
Papiamento, is spoken by the majority of the population.
In historical terms, Latin America could be defined
as all those parts of the Americas that were once
part of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Empires,
and that speak languages stemming from Latin.
Under this definition, much of the U.S. Southwest,
Florida, and Louisiana would be also included
in the region.
The distinction between Latin America and Anglo-America,
and more generally the stress on European heritage
(or Eurocentrism), is simply a convention by which
Romance-language and English-speaking cultures
are distinguished, currently being the predominant
languages in the Americas. There are, of course,
many places in the Americas (e.g. highland Ecuador,
Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay) where American
Indian cultures and languages are predominant,
as well as areas in which the influence of African
cultures is strong (e.g. the Caribbean, including
parts of Colombia and Venezuela, coastal Ecuador,
and coastal Brazil).
U.S. influences shaped the cultures of Latin America,
especially those of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico
as a U.S. territory. In addition, the U.S. held
a territory in a swath of land in Panama over
the 20-mile-long Panama Canal from 1903 (the canal
opened to transoceanic freight traffic in 1914)
to 1979 when the U.S. government agreed to give
the territory back to Panama. (Credit:
Wikipedia).
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