In advance of the second running of their extremely popular Super High Roller Bowl that begins on May 29, Poker Central is looking to get the fans involved. Their method? Offering a pile of money to a lucky person in a promotion tied in with the event.
Poker Central, in coordination with the 2016 Super High Roller Bowl and MVMT, are presenting the Million Dollar Final Table Challenge. Viewers and visitors to pokercentral.com are encouraged to look over the list of contenders that are taking part in the $300,000 buy in event, then they will select the seven players that will make up the final table of the event. While it might seem fairly easy to do this, there is a small caveat that Poker Central and MVMT are putting on those who think they can pick the final table.
Not only do contestants in the Million Dollar Final Table Challenge have to pick the seven people who will make it to the final table, they also have to pick their finishing order exactly. If someone is able to pick all seven players correctly, that person will earn a million-dollar payday. If no one picks the final table correctly, then the person who is closest (points will be given to the final table finishers on the entries as to who picks closest) will earn a $10,000 payday and the top 25 finishers will receive MVMT watches for their efforts.
The contest is similar in scope as to what billionaire investor Warren Buffett promoted in 2015 with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. In that event, Buffett offered a billion-dollar payout to anyone who was able to pick all 65 of the NCAA tournament games correctly. It was a pretty good bet for Buffett that no one would be able to do that; the odds of a perfect bracket in the NCAA were 1 in 1,610,543,269 for that 2015 contest and no one made it out of the Round of 32.
It appears that it might be marginally easier to make the right selections in the MVMT/Poker Central Million Dollar Final Table Challenge. People will be able to get their entries in up to the close of the Day 1 proceedings, so they will know who has gotten off to a good start and who is either scraping along at the bottom of the leaderboard or who has already departed the tournament. It is still in the realm of a millions-to-one chance of getting every member of the final table correct AND THEN getting their finishing position exactly correct, however.
The 2015 version of this tournament was one of the most watched events of the year. Then a $500,000 buy in tournament, poker’s elite came together at Aria in Las Vegas (also playing host to this year’s tournament) to vie for one of the largest prize pools in poker. Defeating a final table that consisted of Tom Marchese, David Peters, Timofey Kuznetsov, Connor Drinan and Scott Seiver, Brian Rast was able to outlast everyone to walk away with the $7.525 million first place prize.
When the tournament was announced again for 2016, the players flooded the Aria to get in on the action. The tournament was officially sold out in March, prompting Aria Director of Poker Operations Sean McCormick to remark, “I’ve never seen a high stakes tournament sell out three months in advance…it’s unprecedented.” Should one of the players that has already bought into this year’s tournament be unable to take part, McCormick has stated that there is a waiting list of other eager players wanting to join the party.
Rast will be back to defend his championship in 2016, but the field will be bigger than last year’s 42 players. 49 will be waiting for Rast this year, including the entirety of last year’s final table. Also a part of the mix will be all-time leading money winner Daniel Negreanu, 13-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth, inaugural “Big One for One Drop” champion Antonio Esfandiari and the man who followed him as victor in that tournament, Dan Colman, the tournament’s first female player in Kathy Lehne, Dominik Nitsche, Igor Kurganov, Fedor Holz and Christoph Vogelsang (just to name a few challengers).
The MVMT/Poker Central Super High Roller Bowl will begin play on May 29, live from Aria in Las Vegas and broadcast “plausibly live” (the delay necessary to satiate the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s worries over possible foul play) over Poker Central. The final table will play out on June 1, with the champion earning a $5 million first place prize.
