Betfair Sponsors First TV Poker Tournament
Betfair Sponsors First TV Poker Tournament posted by: PokerLOG on 04 April 2007
British online gambling site Betfair (www.betfair.com) is to sponsor its first televised offline poker tournament, the company announced.
The tournament, dubbed the “Betfair.com Poker Masters of Europe,” is to be a 36-player, invitation-only event with a top prize of $120,000.
It is scheduled to be held May 11-14, 2007, in front of a live audience at the Riverside Studios in London, and is to feature celebrity players from around the world.
The tournament is to be produced by Emblaze Productions, who produced the British Poker Open, the Million-Dollar Cash Game and the European Poker Masters, and is slated to air on Sky Television in the U.K. and elsewhere worldwide.
“We aim to make this the most important invitational event of the year,” said Betfair’s head of poker, Ben Fried.
“The Betfair Asian Poker Tour is a fantastic open tournament for our players, but this event will be more exclusive,” he said. “We expect some exciting characters from sport and screen as well as the top poker players. It will make great TV.”
According to tournament organizers, the tourney will begin with the 36 entrants split among six tables of six players each.
After each table is winnowed down to one player, the six finalists will compete at a final table, the organizers said.
The winner of the final table will then be crowned tournament champion, and take home a top prize expected to be around $120,000, the organizers said.
Most of the tournament participants will be invited professional poker players or celebrities from the worlds of television, film and sport, but one-sixth of the field will be reserved for “average Joe’s” who want to try their luck against top celebs and poker pros.
And while each of the 30 invited tournament participants will have to pay a $7,500 buy-in fee to enter the tourney, six other people will qualify for the tourney merely by winning Betfair online qualifying tourneys that cost just a few dollars to enter.
So far, the only celebrity that has been confirmed for the tournament is Betfair Asian Poker Tour champion Tony G., who also runs his own online poker room, Tony G. Poker (www.tonygpoker.com).
James Hopkins, managing director of Emblaze Productions, predicted that the Betfair tournament will be a smash. “For the Betfair.com Poker Masters of Europe, we will build on our unrivalled experience for high quality productions to make this the best televised event of the year,” he said.
For all the latest news about Poker in the UK please visit our Poker News section.