Gus Hansen and Phil Hellmuth win One Drop seats

Posted by Steve Ruddock on Jul 01, 2012 Posted in Poker News | No Comments »

On Saturday both the Rio and the Aria were hosting mega-satellites into the Big One for One Drop $1,000,000 buy-in tournament taking place on Sunday. The Aria satellite awarded one seat to the event; while the Rio saw 96 players enter their $25,300 satellite, giving first and second place $1,000,000 seats along with $400k for the third place finisher.

The winners of both satellites were two of the biggest names in poker, both surprisingly absent from the initial One Drop list: Gus Hansen (won the Rio satellite with Shaun Deeb coming in second and being the first alternate for the event) and Phil Hellmuth won the Aria satellite, although details on the Aria/MGM satellite are scant, and only a couple of congratulatory Tweets from Gary Wise and Seth Palansky are being used to confirm this.

Hansen’s seat was one in a normally structured satellite (you’ll see why I am saying this when I get to Hellmuth’s) and it seems that Shaun Deeb was far more interested in the $1 million for second place than playing One Drop and he and Gus worked out an arrangement to make sure Gus won the seat: On the second to last hand he raised to over 3 million chips which Gus Hansen just called, leaving Deeb just one $5,000-chip. Deeb then folded to Gus’ flop bet and lost the subsequent all-in.

Hellmuth’s seat came in an oddly structured satellite that featured a $125,000 buy-in for Aria/MGM high-rollers, and it seems they then chose Hellmuth to represent them in One Drop, keeping the equity stakes they had won in the satellite, as 3Fivediamonds on 2+2 stated:

[Hellmuth] didn’t win the satellite or get staked by Aria. He got staked by the high rollers who were freerolling for the seat, unless my reading comprehension is off here.

Instead of one person winning a seat (and most likely being an underdog to the field) they seemingly made a deal 8 handed and chose Hellmuth to play for them, each with different equity depending on how they finished.

This was an MGM corp giveaway to their biggest whales. They can do whatever they want with the money. Harrahs doesn’t have any say in this assuming MGM reserved a seat for a player to be announced at a later date.

Here is a look at how the payouts were arranged for the MGM Corp. seat:

– 1st place: the winner will get 30% of the action and will play the Million Dollar One Drop Tournament.

– 2nd place player will get 20% of the action.

– 3rd place the player will get 14% of the action.

– 4th place the player will get 10% of the action.

– 5th place the player will get 8% of the action.

– 6th place the player will get 7% of the action.

– 7th place the player will get 6% of the action.

– 8th place the player will get 5% of the action.

With One Drop scheduled to kick-off later today we will hopefully get the full story on the Hellmuth situation, which could very well have been planned all along considering Phil was very coy about playing in the event and the entire poker world was shocjked his name wasn’t on the official list released yesterday.

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