2009 WPT Championship Gets Started on Saturday

Published on April 18th, 2009 3:47 am EST

The 2009 Five-Star World Poker Classic main event (aka the World Poker Tour Championship) gets underway at 12 pm local time on Saturday afternoon.

The event, which is being held at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, will feature many of the top poker players in the world.

Names that are expected to participate include: Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan and David Benyamine.

The event is probably the second most prestigious single poker tournament in the world (behind the WSOP main event).

Unlike the World Series of Poker main event, the WPT Championship is pretty much stacked from top to bottom, and doesn't have too much in the way of "dead money". There will be no weak tables in this tournament.

The event, as mentioned, kicks off at 12 pm local time on Saturday.

Day 1A will run on Saturday, while Day 1B will run on Sunday. The two fields will combine on Monday, and a champion will be crowned sometime on Saturday evening.

The structure of the tournament allows for tons of play (players start with 100k chips, blinds begin at 50/100, 90 minute levels), so we will really get to witness some great poker over the upcoming week.

Previous winners of the WPT Championship include: Alan Goehring, Martin De Knijff, Tuan Le, Joe Bartholdi, Carlos Mortensen and David Chiu.

Last year's main event had a total of 545 entrants, which created a total prize pool of around $13.2 million dollars. David Chiu, who beat Gus Hansen in heads-up play to take down the title, walked away with around $3.4 million dollars.

Given the current state of the economy, it should be interesting to see what kind of a turnout there is for this year's event.

We'll be covering the WPT Championship on this site and Pokerkingblog.com.

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Filed Under: Tournament Results