2009-2010 World Poker Tour Closing in on WPT Championship at Bellagio

With eight tournament stops remaining, and 11 in the books, the 2009/2010 World Poker Tour is quickly approaching the WPT World Championship at Bellagio that will take place in mid-late April 2010 -oddly, the Championship event is not the final stop of the season, with the Grand Prix de Paris taking place a couple weeks after the Bellagio event.

Season 8 of the highly popular tournament series has had some hit-and-miss results up to this point, and the poker world is waiting to see what, if any, changes will be made by the new ownership group PartyGaming in the upcoming months.

Of the first 11 tournaments, only four have had first-prizes exceeding $1 million -which I would argue is the measuring stick of a major tournament’s success-Bellagio Cup V, Legends of Poker, Festa al Lago, and the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic: with three of those four tournaments oddly enough taking place at the Bellagio Casino.

Still on the schedule are popular stops such as the Bay 101 Shooting Star, The LA Poker Classic, and of course the WPT Championship Event at the Bellagio.

Stops outside of Las Vegas, such as the once popular stops in Atlantic City and Foxwoods have seen dwindling attendance numbers the past couple years to the point where the Borgata in Atlantic City dropped the Main Event buy-in to $3,500!

Additionally, the WPT’s attempts to capture the foreign market has been met with very pedestrian-like results; of the four non-US stops the top prize has been around $500,000, with the Slovakia event awarding only $148k to the winner -not the results you’re looking for in a major tournament.

It would seem the rise of the European Poker Tour, Asian Pacific Poker Tour, Latin American Poker Tour as well as the World Series of Poker Europe, World Series of Poker Circuit Series and other poker tours has siphoned off many potential WPT players. Even with these mixed results, the WPT is definitely at the top of the food chain as far as poker tours go. However, PokerStars recent announcement of the North American Poker Tour has many wondering if the popular online poker site has its site set on combining the numerous poker tours they sponsor into a serious rival of the WPT -now owned by a direct competitor in Party Gaming.

PokerStars operates the European Poker Tour, Asian Pacific Poker Tour, Latin American Poker Tour, and now the North American Poker Tour, giving them a strong foothold across the world. It remains to be seen if PokerStars intent is to simply get there main product -online poker– into every corner of the globe, or if their intention is to create a single poker tour and seemingly monopolize that industry as well?

The next WPT stop is the Southern Poker Championship taking place in Biloxi Mississippi from January 24^th to the 27^th. The Southern Poker Championship has replaced the World Poker Open formerly held at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Tunica Mississippi, on the WPT schedule.