The election may be over, but there's still a major contest of 2008 left to be decided.
Each year around June, the run of dozens of tournaments known as the World Series of Poker (WSOP) plays out in Vegas. It's kinda like Ramadan for poker players. It culminates in the "Main Event," a $10K buy-in no-limit hold'em event that in recent years (since the poker boom on TV and the net) has attracted as many as 6000 hopefuls. The explosion of interest has resulted in insane payoffs for the tourney; this year, first place is worth over $9 million. The winner of the Main Event also receives the informal title of world poker champion.
This year, as a publicity stunt, the Main Event was paused with 9 players remaining (the "final table"). The idea was to have 4 months for excitement to build in the poker world, maximizing the audience for when ESPN televises the finale this coming week.
Final table play begins on Sunday. They'll play down to 2 players, who will battle heads-up on Monday eve. ESPN will air the results on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to the excitement, and reading up on the profiles of the 9 combatants on sites like pokerlistings.com.
3 comments:
Thanks for the heads-up; I'll have to check that out later today. Hope they have it on ESPN-HD!
I believe that ESPN will broadcast WSOP in High Definition on Tues night. (I just recently got a bigger, flat-screen, high-def TV. My main motivation was for the weekly viewing of Survivor Africa with my buddies -- the current season is the first in HD. But it'll be great for the WSOP finale as well.)
Based on my local, SF Bay Area Comcast cable listings, ESPN 724 (ESPND) will air in HD "Final Table Preview" on Tues 5-6pm, followed by "Conclusion of the 2008 Main Event" 6-8pm.
I managed to catch it on ESPN2HD on my cable service - Cablevision.
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