In addition to Prague and the Bahamas, December's poker extravaganza also attracts players to Las Vegas, where the WPT once again wraps up its 22nd season with a spectacular festival. The Main Event is no guarantee this year, but with a buy-in of $10,400, we can look forward to a multi-million dollar prize pool once again. The aforementioned ME kicks off tomorrow (14.12.), and the biggest freeroll the poker world has ever seen - the $5 million ClubWPT Gold Freeroll - will also begin today.
All of these tournaments were preceded by the popular $1,100 buy-in Prime event. The latter is also well known to players from Europe, as the global tour regularly includes stops in Bratislava, Liechtenstein and Paris. However, any of the European stops are nowhere near the numbers of the American ones.
Last year, the Prime event became the biggest in its history with 10,512 entries, and the poker public was curious to see if that record could be broken. Although the foursome of flights gradually saw more and more entries, with Flight 1D becoming the biggest flight in history thanks to 3,866 entries, the entries counter eventually stopped at 9,670. While the record remains unbroken, the prizepool of $9,379,000 still proves the success of this event.
You won't find many $1k events in the world that will make you a millionaire - after all, the winner of this tournament will take home $1,162,350 plus a $10k ticket to the Main Event. We'll find out who that will be tonight, as the final day of this tournament is upon us.
Last night was a long Day 2, which featured 1,206 advancing players. Those all had a sure $1,940 mincash, but looking at the first place finish, that certainly didn't satisfy anyone. By the end of the day, the field had dwindled down to the last 99 players, led by Diane Zimmerman. Each of the Day 3 entrants is assured of an $8,600 bounty, with play kicking off again tonight European time.
Source - WorldPokerTour, Flickr