After taking a week to get over my the New Year\’s Eve hangover, the poker world has gotten back underway big time with one of the biggest tournament stops of the year, the PokerStars Carribean Adventure. Tournament series\’ are starting up all over the world, with a few minor main events taking place over the course of the next few weeks, but for the next week-and-a-half the best players in the world will be fighting over millions of dollars in the Bahamas.
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (Nassau Paradise Island, Bahamas)
The typical poker tournament series tends to start off with a small buy-in event that will attract a nice sized field. The PCA is anything but the normal tournament series, and nowhere was it more evident than in how they started. A super high-roller event with a $100,000 buy-in drew 38 of the heaviest hitters in the game, including the elusive Viktor Blom.
Long-rumored to be the man behind the online handle \”isildur1\”, one of the PCA\’s other \”surprises\” was the official reveal of Blom as isildur. It was one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry, but at least during the high-roller event Blom went without a Team PokerStars pro patch, though it wouldn\’t have mattered much. Blom was one of the Day 1 casualties of the SHR event, coming nowhere close to a final table that will be shown later this year on ESPN2. Other early casualties included Jonathan Duhamel, Scott Seiver, Tom Marchese and ElkY.
When action finally got down to a final table, two of the seven players would be sent home on a very painful bubble. The unfortunate two were Andrew \”luckychewy\” Lichtenberger and former Time \”Man of the Year\” Sandor Demjan of Hungary, going home empty-handed. The final five was quite an impressive group, with Humberto Brenes, Nick Schulman, Bryn Kenney, Eugene Katchalov and Daniel Negreanu competing for the $1.5 million first prize. Katchalov led Negreanu 3-1 going into heads-up play, and despite several double-ups, Negreanu could never close the gap. Eugene Katchalov was crowned the 2011 PCA Super High Roller Champion, taking home the $1.5 million first prize, but all was not lost for Negreanu, as the $1 million second place prize puts him ahead of Phil Ivey and on top of the list of all-time tournament cashes. [PokerStars Blog]
Monday saw the start of Day 2 of the PCA Main Event, which saw the largest field ever for this tournament, a combined 1,560 players from two starting days that generated a prize pool of over $15 million and a first place prize of $2.3 million. As of the publishing of this post, Marco \”crazymarco\” Johnson was eliminated in 233rd place, breaking the bubble and guaranteeing everyone still in the field of at least $15,000.
The biggest news about the Main Event has to be the fact that the final table will be broadcast on a one hour delay by ESPN. Starting at 5 pm ET on ESPN3.com and simulcast starting at 10pm ET on ESPN2, the broadcast will feature hole card cameras and will play out the entirety of the final table in real time as it happens. This is the grandest experiment of this type and it will certainly be fascinating to see how the final table and the coverage turn out. [PokerStars Blog]
World Series of Poker Circuit – Choctaw (Durant, Oklahoma)
The WSOP Circuit has just touched down an hour outside of Dallas at the Choctaw Casino in Durant, Oklahoma for a week\’s worth of tournaments. The first of eight ring events took place over the weekend. The $350 tournament had 935 players sign up, and it was David Clark of Dallas, Texas taking home the ring and over $50,000 for the win [WSOP].