Top 10 Most Prestigious Poker Tournaments

With new poker tours popping up left and right, and the more established poker tours adding more and more stops I thought I would list the top 10 poker tournaments in terms of prestige; where winning the event would immediately elevate you to the top of the poker food-chain.

#10 - Full Tilt Online Poker Series main Event: The FTOPS Main Event boasts a prize-pool of $2.5 million; not bad for a $500 buy-in tournament!

#9 -PokerStars WCOOP Main Event: PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker offers the biggest prize in Online Poker with a $10+ million prize-pool in 2009.

#8 - NBC Heads-Up Poker Championship: The national Heads-Up Poker Championship is one of the most innovative formats; and the only non-standard that has done well on television. The only reason the tournament isn’t ranked higher is because of its invitation-only format.

#7 - PokerStars Caribbean Adventure: The PCA has quickly become one of the most popular tournaments in the world. As a stop on three separate poker tours -EPT, NAPT, and AAPT-the tournament draws huge fields: Taking place in the Caribbean obviously helps too!

#6 - European Poker Tour Championship: The EPT is drawing staggering attendance numbers at numerous stops, and could overtake the WPT as the top poker tour. The championship event takes place in Monte Carlo, and has smashed attendance records almost every year.

#5 - World Series of Poker Europe Main Event: The WSOPE has catapulted many names to the forefront of the poker world; a trend that is sure to continue as ESPN has added the tournament to its television schedule.

#4 - Aussie Millions: The Aussie Millions shot to prominence after Joe Hachem’s WSOP win, and the tournament is now as synonymous to poker as the World Series is to baseball.

#3 - World Series of Poker $50k Mixed Event: The tournament’s format is changing in 2010 to an 8-game mix -from the HORSE format it has used since its inception-but the $50k event is considered the Poker Pros championship due to its hefty $50k buy-in, and different poker variants employed.

#2 — World Poker Tour Championship: The WPT wraps up its season with the $25k championship event at the Bellagio, which has been a huge hit since its inception. The WPT Championship was one of the first tournaments to attempt a buy-in of over $10k.

#1 — World Series of Poker Main Event: The original is still the on top, and the WSOP Main Event is definitely #1 on every poker player’s to-do list. With thousands of entrants and first place prize-money in the multi-million -with a high of $12 million in 2006-the tournament not only makes a poker player rich, but extremely famous!