Poker News Daily has confirmed that the Borgata Poker Classic has been removed from the schedule for Season VII of the World Poker Tour (WPT). Officials from both the WPT and Borgata confirmed that the event will not be a part of the seventh installment of the marquee poker tour, which will air on cable station Fox Sports Net. The tournament is also called the Borgata Winter Open and will go on as planned in January at the New Jersey casino.
On Sunday, December 7th, the Borgata is holding a Winter Open Super Satellite. The $1,100 buy-in event will award a $20,000 prize package for every 20 players registered, which includes a $3,200 buy-in to the Borgata Poker Open Main Event as well as $16,800 in cash. In January of 2008, the Borgata Poker Open, then a World Poker Tour sanctioned tournament, had a Main Event that came with a $10,000 price tag. According to Borgata’s website, the Main Event of the Borgata Winter Open will take place from January 25th through 29th, 2009.
The 2008 Borgata Poker Open, a World Poker Tour stop that takes place in September, was won by Vivek Rajkumar, who is known as “Psyduck” in the online poker world. The event drew 516 players, which was down from the 560 who took the field in 2007. There were 540 players who descended on the Borgata for the 2006 installment of the fall tournament. However, the drop-off in number of players from 2007 to 2008, 8%, was noticeable. Rajkumar defeated a six-man final table that also included Sang Kim, Dan Heimiller, Jason Strochak, Mark Seif, and Andrew Knee. Heimiller and Seif are both World Series of Poker bracelet holders.
January’s Borgata Poker Classic was won by Gavin Griffin, who became the only player ever to have won major titles in WPT, WSOP, and European Poker Tour events. His WSOP bracelet came by virtue of winning a $3,000 buy-in Pot Limit Hold’em tournament in 2004. He defeated Gary Bush heads-up and Ultimate Bet pro Phil Hellmuth finished seventh. Griffin won the EPT’s Monte Carlo Grand Final during Season 3, its annual end of season tournament, pocketing $2.4 million in the process. That final table featured his heads-up opponent, Marc Karam, as well as Andy Black and Ram Vaswani.
The WPT is currently on hiatus until December 13th, when the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic Main Event begins. The tournament will crown a champion six days later. The $15,000 buy-in event awards 45,000 starting chips to each player. Blind levels last 90 minutes each and there is a 15 minute break held at the end of each level. The winner of the Five Diamond World Poker Classic, like the champion of each of the season’s tournaments, receives an entry into the $25,000 WPT Championship, which is held at the Bellagio every April.
Preliminary events at the Bellagio begin on Friday with a $540 buy-in Spade Club No Limit Hold’em tournament that kicks off at 2:00pm local time. A series of No Limit tournaments take place between Saturday and December 11th and the buy-ins for these events range between $1,590 and $5,180. Visit the Bellagio website for more details.
From the Bellagio, the WPT crew travels southeast to the Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi for the Southern Poker Championship. It’s a $10,000 buy-in event. The tournament was called the Gulf Coast Poker Championship during Season VI and was held in September of 2007. It attracted 256 entrants and was won by Bill Edler, who defeated a final table that included new World Poker Association Board Member “Captain” Tom Franklin.
