NAPT Venetian Event Ends Up with 870 Player Field

Published on February 20th, 2010 10:07 pm EST

According to Pokerstars, a total of 870 players decided to take part in the first ever NAPT Venetian event in Las Vegas.

The tournament, which got under way just a few hours ago, is the second event in the newly formed NAPT (North American Poker Tour).

The event is being taped for broadcast on ESPN2, and will be aired on April 26th (10 pm ET).

Many "Team Pokerstars Pro" members are taking part in this event, including Daniel Negreanu, Greg Raymer, Barry Greenstein, Chris Moneymaker and Joe Hachem.

There were rumors swirling earlier this week that Full Tilt Poker was instructing its "red pros" to steer clear of this tournament. Full Tilt's representation in this tournament seems pretty light, as I have only seen David Benyamine, Gavin Smith and Justin "Boosted J" Smith mentioned in any chip counts or updates so far. Many of Full Tilt's top names are at the Commerce for the WPT Celebrity Invitational though, which gets under way in just a few minutes.

Players started this event with 30,000 chips, and each level is an hour long on Day 1. Starting tomorrow, the levels will be 75 minutes long. Players will battle it out for a total of five days, with the eventual winner being crowned on February 24th.

Erica Schoenberg, Joe Cada and Daniel Negreanu are a few of the names who are off to strong starts in this event. David Benyamine, Kevin Saul and Justin Bonomo, on the other hand, have all been sent to the rail already.

Pokerstars has to be doing cartwheels over the turnout for this event. The online poker behemoth's impact on this event has obviously been profound, as last year's Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza main event in February had a turnout of 263 players, and the buy-in was only half as much ($2,375+$125).

The first two events of the NAPT (PCA, Venetian) have had a total of just under $20 million in prize money and nearly 2,500 total registrations. The World Poker Tour can't be happy about that at all, as the NAPT will just continue to eat into their field sizes and overall exposure.

We'll have further updates as this tournament progresses..


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Filed Under: Other Poker News