The big announcement that the WSOP announced on Twitter over the weekend has now turned up online. The 2010 WSOP Tournament of Champions will have 27 players will meet in June to play for a $1 million prize pool with the winner earning $500,000. The twist for this year is that the public will vote for the remaining field of 20 WSOP bracelet winners. A list of the 521 living bracelet winners is available here , along with the current top 50 in online voting. Voting starts at noon ET March 15 and runs through June 15th at midnight. The other spots have been filled by these players:

Joe Cada – 2009 WSOP ME winner
Barry Shulman – 2009 WSOPE ME winner
Mike Sexton – 2006 WSOP TOC winner
Mike Matusow – 2005 WSOP TOC Winner
Annie Duke – 2004 WSOP TOC Winner
Two sponsor exemptions (the WSOP will announce details on how these seats will be awarded shortly)

The TOC will begin on June 27th at noon, and play down to the final table. Play will then resume July 4th (the day before the WSOP Main Event begins) and play down to a winner. ESPN will film the action to air as a two-hour show on August 3rd. The entire press release is on page 2:

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Whoever woulda thunk it … that the first big winner of 2010 would’ve graduated high school with the Class of 2009?

But Harrison Gimbel, 19, now a freshman at the University of Alabama, became the youngest PCA champion ever, winning $2.2 million by besting a record field of 1,529 in the $10k main event.

Gimbel-Gamble: I went to the Bahamas and all I got was this lousy PokerStars-dot-net T-shirt.

But Gimbel — now arguably the Doyle Brunson of Generation Z — didn’t come out of nowhere. He began playing poker at age 13 … and hit the Florida poker rooms at 18 (the legal age there) while still a student at a tony Palm Beach prep school. In June of last year, during the 21-and-up World Series, he won the Florida State Championship — a $900 main event that paid $65k. He followed that up during the November Nine, final tabling a PokerStars Sunday Million for $47k, and then the next week taking down a $125 tourney on Stars for $25k.

He won his way into the PCA via a $1,000 live satellite. On Day 1, he got it all-in pre-flop with 4-6 offsuit to crack Barry Greenstein’s Aces.

* He plays online as Gibler321.
* He’s been a member of Daniel Negreanu’s Full Contact Poker community since 2006.
* The NAPT-PCA champ will be too young to compete in the NAPT-Venetian event.

Barry Shulman, the only actual grandpa at the final table, btw, finished 3rd, booking his second million-dollar tournament win in the past four months.

CORRECTION: Turns out Gimbel dropped out of Alabama three weeks into school. Way to go, kiddo! You have chosen the right career path, as nowhere but in poker is dropping out of school more celebrated.

The long wait is almost over as the November Nine take their place at the final table Saturday afternoon. The following look at stack sizes, seat position, blind levels, M, etc. is part of a much larger post I made over at 2+2 regarding the final table, the information taken from the WSOP November Nine Media Guide:

Final Table Details

1 – Darvin Moon 58,930,000
2 – James Akenhead 6,800,000
3 – Phil Ivey 9,765,000
4 – Kevin Schaffel 12,390,000
5 – Steven Begleiter 29,885,000
6 – Eric Buchman 34,800,000
7 – Joseph Cada 13,215,000
8 – Antoine Saout 9,500,000
9 – Jeff Shulman 19,580,000

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From the current issue of Bluff Europe:

We never thought we’d say this, but Barry [Shulman], we salute you! Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go and throw up.

Still up for grabs: the vaunted poker yarmulke awarded to Last Jew Standing.

Here’s a storyline that ESPN somehow missed/didn’t feed us on the media-prep conference call … It’s a very Jewish WSOP main event final table.

The Jewish Daily Forward points out what may or may not be a statistical anomaly: Four of the November Nine — Jeff Shulman, Steve Begleiter, Eric Buchman, and Kevin Schaffel — happen to speak Hebrew, at least during family holidays.

From a stack perspective, these Jewish players control 49.6 percent of all the chips in play. How stereotypical …

The J-article also offers a rich history of Jews in the game … from Jack Strauss to Jamie Gold … and most recently Barry Shulman’s Yom Kippur victory at WSOP-E. Back in the day, of course, the World Series was all about Jews vs. Texans, but Texans have been sucking it up in recent years now the game has a more widespread international appeal that has prevented any one region from owning pwning it.

Full Disclosure: I used to make an annual pilgrimage to a Dallas synagogue in an effort to bring people with money to the Lodge convert non-gentiles to the poker way. So yeah …

ALT HED: נובמבר תשע עצה: בית על היהודים

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in poker with notable tournaments running in locations as diverse as London, Aruba and… Blackhawk, Colorado? To keep you up with who’s winning around the world, our crack staff is everywhere. We think.

Barry Shulman
WSOPE Main Event
London, England

With more than $1.3 million in first-place money and a WSOP bracelet on the line, the match had Academy Award potential as Shulman, father of November Niner and up-and-coming poker bad boy Jeff “Happy” Shulman, bettered perennial fan favorite and all-time tournament money winner Daniel Negreanu.

For full play-by-play of the epic 17-hour, big-name final table, click here

Aaron Gustavson
EPT London Main Event
London, England

Across town at the Grosvenor Casino, it took just seven hands of heads-up play for 23-year-old online pro Aaron Gustavson to knock off defending WSOP main event champ Peter Eastgate and claim the £850,000 first-place prize at the EPT London Main Event.

More details at EuropeanPokerTour.com

Brandon Hall
Aruba Poker Classic
Aruba

A little rain couldn’t dampen Hall’s spirits as the 20-year-old online qualifier from Littlestown, Pa., beat out 474 other players to claim more than $753,000 and the title of Aruba Poker Classic Champion after defeating Robert Mizrachi in heads-up play. He plays online as “AreTheseUtz”.

Read more about him at the UltimateBet Blog

William Givens
HPT Mile High Poker Open
Black Hawk, CO

24-year old William Givens won nearly $145,000 and his mother’s respect after taking down the Heartland Poker Tour’s Mile High Poker Open at the Golden Gates Casino earlier this month. Givens, who has been playing professionally for just over a year, won his way into the $1,650 main event through a $360 satellite. Using cash game winnings from the weekend, he actually won two satellites and sold the other seat for additional profit.

Read more about his biggest win to date on the Heartland Poker Tour here

It was a seemingly epic battle for a queen’s ransom that went well into the wee hours GMT … old-school poker in Poker’s N€w World, if you will.

And making his second consecutive go at the WSOP-E main-event title, runner-up Daniel Negreanu would come up two outs short of being “happy” that he just became the biggest winner in the history of tournament poker.

photo: The Tower / A World of Poker

Negreanu knocked out six of the other final table-ists to get heads-up. And yet in the end Barry Shulman — CardPlayer’s overlord emeritus — held strong in a war of presumably tight aggression to win £801,603 (= $1,283,687 USD). That, of course, is almost exactly the amount his son Jeff has been guaranteed for making the November Nine. No added pressure/father’s shadow issues for sure.

Negreanu’s second-place finish and £496k payday propelled him to the top of the all-time tourney-money leaderboard, passing Jamie Gold and Phil Ivey — who now needs to finish 6th-or-better this November to re-pass Negreanu as the winningest tournament player ever.

(Thanks, Lance, for the deets!)

Here’s video of the final two hands from The Casino at the Empire, Leicester Square:

(If for some reason the above vid disappears, you can find the original page here.)

For those of us debating how ESPN and PokerPROductions (a different film crew than the gang producing WSOP-LV episodes) should do their broadcasting jobs … it seems this 6-day event will be shown in 2 hours, not 20 … and that includes squeezing in the Caesar’s Cup! While that may not seem to do poker-junkie justice to a tournament that kept a bunch of us jaded, immune-to-tourney-hype types checking in on the action for more than 16 hours of final table play, I suppose movie-length could work, too.

UPDATE: Clarification of ESPN’s programming intent in the comments below (from ESPN sources who would know). They plan to give it way too much more coverage than implied above.

Click below for Nolan’s official write-up/script:

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Spoiler Alert:

Shulman wins, Negreanu Lederers It

They’re heads-up at the WSOP-E main event … Barry Shulman vs. Daniel Negreanu.

Dare I say I’m rooting for Shulman? Not sure I really believe that. But I do like the father-son storyline possibilities for the November Nine.

(Barry apparently just became a grandfather a few days ago, btw. Not sure if it was his first or 17th, but word is that son Happy just spawned new Shulman progeny.)

Follow the action here.

From MySpace.com/Pokerati:

UPDATE: LOL, as per the PokerNews ShoutBox, I guess it’s official, I’m rooting for Barry. Not sure how that happened!

Slow action or not … that’s what TV editing is for, and makes me think some damn good poker is being played. (Ahh, how I’ve been corrupted from back in the day when I thought every final table should be shown live in its totality.)

Seriously, can’t wait to see it on TV. You’ve got bracelets out the yin-yang. Two November Niners. The father of the November Nine’s bad-guy. An epicurean old-timer Brit. Daniel Negreanu. International flavor. Accomplished young guns. Scandis. All in the pretty cool setting that is The Casino at the Empire.

It was a sexy, if not tough field to get through, too. The in-the-money fight from four tables down to one saw Doyle Brunson, Liz Lieu, EPL soccer legend Teddy Sheringham, Devilfish, Men the Master, Hendon Mobber Ram Vaswani, Steven Z for good measure, and plenty of valid others.

(Wouldn’t it be dandy if ESPN could show maybe an hour of lead-up, with two hours of final table? Just an NFL football game, ya know?)

@JeffreyPollack’s been giving his eloquently bare-bones play-by-play.

And you can also follow via our pals at Betfair.

Click below to see a more detailed breakdown of the players of what may well be one of the most storied final tables of the year:

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The main event of WSOP Europe is underway now, with a super exciting final table of poker stars. These were the starting chip counts when they took their seats:

Seat 1: Barry Shulman (1,090,000)
Seat 2: Jason Mercier (3,198,000)
Seat 3: Praz Bansi (1,160,000)
Seat 4: Markus Ristola (784,000)
Seat 5: Chris Bjorin (518,000)
Seat 6: James Akenhead (1,398,000)
Seat 7: Daniel Negreanu (438,000)
Seat 8: Antoine Saout (701,000)
Seat 9: Matt Hawrilenko (674,000)

The group consists of six previous WSOP bracelet winners (Shulman, Mercier, Bansi, Bjorin, Negreanu, & Hawrilenko), two members of the November Nine (Akenhead & Saout), and a father of a November Niner (Shulman).

More than four hours into the final table “action,” Negreanu worked his way into second place. And that’s about it. Play continues with the likelihood that someone will eventually be eliminated. Live coverage can be found on the World Series of Poker website.