WSOP: Tournament of Champions Begins Today
June 27th, 2010
Top vote-getter Phil Ivey will play in the TOC today at the Rio.
After months of build-up, the 2010 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions finally gets started today at noon. The $1 million freeroll featuring some of the game’s top players will play four levels beginning at 12 p.m. PT today. The remaining players will return on Monday at noon to play down to a final table, which will then be delayed until July 4th.
The field is a formidable one. Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Allen Cunningham, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, Johnny Chan, Scotty Nguyen, Barry Greenstein, Erik Seidel, Jennifer Harman, Huck Seed, Dan Harrington, T.J. Cloutier, Sammy Farha, Howard Lederer, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem and Antonio Esfandiari all made it into the tournament thanks to the public’s votes. Annie Duke, Mike Matusow and Mike Sexton all earned their seats as former Tournament of Champions winners. Joe Cada and Barry Shulman qualified for winning the 2009 WSOP and WSOP Europe main events, and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier and Andrew Barton won their way in through sponsor exemptions.
The Tournament of Champions is one of the handful of things other than the Main Event being filmed by ESPN this year, with the hopes that its stacked field will draw a bigger audience share than other non-Main Event episodes have in the last few years. The edited footage will be broadcast on the cable network in August, but ESPN3.com will stream the whole thing live beginning at 12 p.m. PT today.
The winner of the WSOP Tournament of Champions will take home $500,000.Runner -up gets $250,000, third place earns $100,000, and the rest of the players at the final table will bank $25,000 each.
