WPT
The World Poker Tour features multiple different tournaments , with some of the top names in the poker world. It began in the United States by TV producer Steven Lipscomb, who’s company WPT Enterprises ran and controlled World Poker Tour until November of 2009. Similar to the World Series of Poker, players who win the events are given bracelets as well as incredible cash prizes for beating out the rest of the field. The World Poker Tour features multiple Texas hold’em tournaments which are held all over the world, with the bulk of the events taking place in the United States.
The World Poker Tour began back in 2002 with the first season being aired on the Travel Channel in 2003, as it ended with the WPT Championship in April of 2003. The Travel Channel continued to air the World Poker Tour for its first five seasons, when in 2007 they decided to move from the Travel Channel to the Game Show Network (GSN). It was not longer after this decision that the WPT moved once again, this time to Fox Sports Net for season seven.
The buy-ins for the World Poker Tour events range anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000, and there are also multiple satellites offered for players to get an opportunity to win their way into one of the many World Poker Tour events. The WPT will typically feature anywhere between 20 and 25 events, and run in locations such as Las Vegas, Prague, Paris, Atlantic City, Barcelona, and many more locations.
Big Names at the World Poker Tour
The World Poker Tour draws in some of the biggest names in poker, as you can tell by some of the names who took down the Player of the Year honors in the past nine season. Players like Howard Lederer, Erick Lindgren, Daniel Negreanu, Gavin Smith, J.C. Tran, and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, have all won the Player of the Year honors at one point during the WPT’s 9 season history. The WPT has drawn in such strong talent that only four players in the first 9 seasons have been able to finish in the money at least once throughout all 9 season. These players were Phil Hellmuth, Erik Seidel, Surinder Sunar, and Mark Seif
Events
The World Poker Tour does their events quite a bit differently than the World Series of Poker does. The WPT airs their coverage of events spread out over a six to seven month span, with each tournament being shown over a 5 day span typically (depending on the size of the event). This has drawn quite a bit of interest from poker fans, as they are always interested to see what will happen at the next event. The World Poker Tour has brought in some popular tournaments, such as the Bellagio Cup, Borgata Poker Open, 5 Diamond World Poker Classic, WPT Invitational, Bay 101 Shooting Star, Hollywood Poker Open, and of course the WPT World Championship. These events all feature some big names, and all have satellites that run on multiple different poker websites, which allow players to win their way into the event instead of having to pay the entry fees.
ClubWPT
ClubWPT was launched back in 2008, and is a subscription based poker website that gives players entry into poker tournaments to win money, prizes, and entries into bigger tournaments. Instead of a traditional poker website where players buy in to tournaments and events, the players instead just pay a monthly fee in order to get full access to every tournament, event, and satellite on the entire website. Players can even win their way into the Main Events at World Poker Tour tournaments.
