In addition to the usual festivities at the World Series of Poker tomorrow, poker fans will also be able to see who will fill the final seat in the Tournament of Champions. 9 players have been named to compete in the invitation only freezeout tournament.

Mike Mizrachi, Tom Dwan, Andy Bloch, Bertrand Grospellier, Gus Hansen, Sorel Mizzi, Liv Boeree, Paul Wasicka and Don Cheadle will all have a chance to gain entry into the $1 million tournament. The rest of the field was voted on at WSOP.com, but because these players hadn’t won a WSOP bracelet prior to the 2010 tournament they were ineligible –I think Dwan, Hansen, and Grosspieller would have been shoe-ins to be among the top 20 vote-getters, and a few of the other players would have had a decent shot as well.

The single table tournament will be filmed for the WSOP Academy website –which is in the works—and will be co-hosted by Ali Nejad and Phil Hellmuth. WSOP Academy CEO Jeff Goldenberg had this to say on the tournament, “We’re very excited to be part of this prestigious event. These nine players are champions in their own right, despite not being given the opportunity to be voted in by the fans. We’re giving them a shot to be part of the TOC and cannot wait for June 10.”

Tags: Tournament of Champions, World Series of Poker, World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, WSOP Academy, WSOP TOC, WSOP Tournament of Champions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Poker 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.