Starting this week, online poker room UB.com is holding a special series of freerolls featuring a spectacular grand prize: a $12,000 World Poker Tour (WPT) Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic package.
The road to the Five Diamond Classic consists of three rounds, none of which requires a single penny to be spent. Round 1 freerolls will run six times every day from October 11th to November 27th. Starting at 12:30am ET and running every four hours through 8:30pm ET, each daily freeroll will send the top 100 finishers to Round 2.
The Round 2 freerolls are of the weekly variety and will be held each Sunday at 4:00pm ET through November 28th. Once again, the top 100 in each Round 2 freeroll will advance to the next round.
The third round is the Main Event of this freeroll series and will take place on Sunday, November 28th at 8:00pm ET. The winner of that tournament will be awarded the $12,000 Five Diamond World Poker Classic prize package, which includes the $10,000 + 300 buy-in to the tournament at the Bellagio in Las Vegas plus $1,700 for travel and accommodations.
In addition to the grand prize at the end of the entire freeroll series, players will also have the chance to compete for a special Wireless Poker Controller, a device favored by many players over the standard mouse and keyboard combination. The top 75 finishers in each of the Round 2 weekly freerolls will win a seat into one of two “Side Events,” slated for October 31st and November 21st at 8:30pm ET. The winner of each of these tournaments will receive a Wireless Poker Controller.
The Controller, made by Poker Controls, is about the size and shape of a hand-held video game controller. Features include bet, check/call, and fold buttons along with table switch triggers, pre-defined bet level buttons, a Raise-O-Meter dial, and even an anti-tilt button that will lockout a player from the tables for a pre-determined about of time.
Last year, the WPT saw 329 players compete in the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic, creating a prize pool of $4,761,450. The star-studded televised final table featured Faraz Jaka, Shawn Buchanan, Scotty Nguyen, and Stephen O’Dwyer, with Daniel Alaei besting Josh Arieh heads-up to win the $1,428,430 first prize. It was Alaei’s first WPT final table and WPT win, helping him finish 10th on the 2009 live tournament money list.
The WPT hopes attendance will improve in 2010, as 2009’s Five Diamond Main Event was significantly smaller than 2008’s version, which had 497 participants and a $7,231,350 prize pool. The Main Event in 2007 was even larger, the largest Five Diamond Main Event in history in fact, with 667 runners vying for the $9,661,200 prize pool. The 2009 Main Event was the smallest since 2003, when Paul Phillips defeated 313 other players to win $1,100,000.
Other past winners of the WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic include Daniel Negreanu, Gus Hansen, and Joe Hachem.
UB.com is a member of the CEREUS Network along with its sister site, Absolute Poker. The CEREUS Network has been battling the International Poker Network (IPN), Microgaming Network, and PokerStars’ French offering, PokerStars.fr, for spots in the lower half of the top ten poker rooms/networks based on cash game traffic. According to PokerScout.com, Cereus is the eighth most popular network, tied with PokerStars.fr with a seven-day average of 1,780 cash game players. Just last week, CEREUS sat in the 10th spot, but has since advanced past IPN (1,580 seven-day average) and Microgaming (1,740).