One of the poker highlights each year has been the World Poker Tour’s $25,000 buy-in championship event that takes place at the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas. The hefty price-tag brings out the best of the best in the poker world, as they battle it out for one of the richest prizes in poker.

Day 1 of the event saw 161 players take to the felt (registration will remain open until 5PM on Day 2 of the event) and of those 161 players, 138 will be back for Day 2. Tournament officials expect roughly 200 total players to enter the event, creating a prize-pool of $5 million. Last year’s tournament saw 338 players enter the tournament, so even one of the most popular and prestigious tournaments in poker isn’t immune to the current down-tick in attendance (especially in the US).

The current chip-leader is Shawn Buchanan with 388,600 chips. A bevy of big name players follow Buchanan including: David Benyamine -291,275, Brian Lemke – 298,825, Yevgeniy Timoshenko – 277,375, Phil Ivey – 230,250, Prahlad Friedman – 204,000, Beth Shak – 189,725, Eric Froehlich – 182,300, Martin de Knijff – 166,425, Amit Makhija – 158,150, Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy – 149,400, Alex “AJKHoosier1” Kamberis – 143,025, Robert Mizrachi – 142,300, David Chiu – 140,950, Justin Bonomo – 139,000, and Isaac Haxton – 125,125.

Related posts:

1. Bellagio accused of using marked cards in poker games If you think that cheating in poker is limited to online poker, and elaborate schemes like the current “Girah”, “junglemna12”, “DogisHead” scandal unfolding on 2+2,...

Tags: bellagio, WPT, WPT Bellagio, WPT Championship, WPT News

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 9:57 am and is filed under WPT News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.