Two major announcements this week illustrate once again the overwhelming popularity of online and terrestrial poker, and the astonishingly large amounts of money flowing around the game.
First came the notification of what is claimed to be the world’s richest ever poker game, with an $80 million winner-take-all prize. This is scheduled to take place at Crown casino in Australia next year. Aussie WSOP champion Joe Hachem is expected to be among the six players who will each pay $13.3 million to enter the tournament. The big event will have three or four top pros, and at least two internet qualifiers.
The four-hour game on July 12 will carry the richest prize in Australian and probably world history and is due to be launched in Los Angeles today. Top US player Phil Ivey, who recently won $1.6 million in back to back tourneys in Monte Carlo run by Prima and FullTilt has agreed to play. The other five are to be named in coming months.
Fox Sports Net is to broadcast the event on television, and they hope the final two hours will be broadcast on the mainstream Fox Network.
“The Professor” Howard Lederer had this to say about the event, and what it will take to win it “The winner of that event is going to be the guy or girl who can kind of put the money completely out of their head. They just have to completely bear down on the task at hand. I think if any player really gets wrapped up in the money, and starts to think ‘Oh my God, I have 10 million wrapped up here’, they may freeze up, they aren’t going to be able to play the good poker that put them in a position to feel like they should play an event like this, and they won’t win.”
Lederer thought the internet qualifiers might really have a chance to win. “If there is an amateur player that is on a freeroll here, where they have nothing to lose in terms of their reputation, they might be freer to play their game, and maybe their game isn’t as good as some of the pros at the table, but if they are able to play their game, and the pros are freezing up because there is a lot at stake in terms of reputation, and the pros have never encountered that situation before, I think the amateurs could have a very reasonable chance.”
Fox Sports Net also featured in the second announcement – the erection of a massive Pokerdome for a new poker series in which cards will carry computer chips and the marquee event will offer the winner $60 million – a payday billed as the biggest ever in sports.
USA Today reported that Fox Sports Net will partner with Mansionpoker.net on a Pokerdome Series. The Dome will be built in Las Vegas and used only for the series. It will be in an as yet unidentified mall or hotel – not a casino – and players will be encased in one-way, mirrored glass with microphones everywhere so fans seated around the dome can hear and see everything, without being seen or heard. George Greenberg, executive vice president of FSN, made up of Fox’s 20 owned or affiliated regional sports channels, says the dome “….will be a Cone of Silence.”
Cards will carry computer chips, so fans know what cards are discarded. And the series, starting in May, will include new “speed poker,” giving players 15 seconds to act or lose immediately. That, says Greenberg, will be “poker with a shot clock.”