Legends of Poker Begins Today in Los Angeles
July 28th, 2010
The 2010 Legend of Poker begins today at the Bicycle Casino.
Between the WSOP, WPT, EPT and a host of other independent tournaments and smaller circuits, live tournament poker is big business these days. Many of the festivals on the newer tours have only been running for a few years at most, but the Bicycle Casino’s Legends of Poker is a holdover from a time before the whirlwind combination of hole-card cameras and online poker unleashed the poker boom on the world. First introduced in 1995, three years after its cross-town competitor, the LA Poker Classic, was first held, the Legends of Poker festival was one of the original stops when the World Poker Tour debuted in 2002.
The WPT’s presence that year boosted the championship event field to 134 players, revitalizing a tournament that was in danger of going away after drawing only 35 players in 2001. Chris Karagulleyan won $258,000 that year and gave the Legends of Poker a reputation as a big post-WSOP draw that has held up to this day. Since then a number of well-known poker pros have won the tournament, including Dan Harrington, John Phan, and last year’s champion Prahlad Friedman.
With a $335 buy-in, four starting days and a $500,000 guaranteed prize pool there should be pretty strong turnout for the first event of this year’s Legends, a no-limit hold’em tournament which will wrap up sometime in the early hours of August 2nd. The rest of the schedule is peppered with poker varieties that should entice the Los Angeles poker community to turn out, including a number of mixed-game events, pot-limit Omaha hi-lo, and seven-card stud hi-lo. All told there are 26 events, including the World Poker Tour championship event, which sports a $5,000 buy-in this year and gets started on August 20th.
