On Thursday, Ultimate Bet announced that, in addition to its Ante Up for Africa Tournament, the online poker room will be holding a 50 Seat Aruba Poker Classic. All told, two major promotions will make for a busy weekend on the popular online poker room, which accepts customers from the United States. The $530 buy-in 50 Seat Guaranteed takes place on Saturday, August 16th at 5:30pm ET (17:30 ET). Each of the 50 packages that will be awarded includes the $5,500 buy-in to the Aruba Main Event plus $3,000 for hotel and travel expenses to the tropical destination.
On Saturday, July 19th, Ultimate Bet held its last 50 Seat Aruba Guarantee. One month later, the online poker room is at it again. The tournament is UB’s featured promotional opportunity throughout the course of the year. Originally, it was a stop on the World Poker Tour, just like the PartyPoker Million and PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. Now, it’s a convention of online poker players, each of whom qualified on Ultimate Bet to enter (or has paid $5,500) and flown thousands of miles to try to make poker history. Those registered so far to play include many of UB’s regulars – Shawn Rice, Debo34, P0ker H0, Scott Ian of Anthrax, JohnnyBax, zoldi22, and –Elusive1-.
Also entered are two familiar names for Ultimate Bet aficionados: Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke. Each serves as the public faces of UB. Hellmuth captains the UB Army, which made waves in Las Vegas during the 2008 World Series of Poker. Duke has constructed the tournament schedule that you’ll find on UB today. Both have also taken hits in the public eye for the recent cheating scandal on UB that involved the site’s former owners exploiting an auditing tool to allow hole cards of every person at a table to be viewed. Ultimate Bet has wrapped up its investigation and turned over its findings to the Kahnawake Gaming Commission.
First place in the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic takes home at least $1 million. This amount is guaranteed to the winner. The rest of the top finishers will take home a portion of the remaining prize pool. Each entrant receives 10,000 starting chips with blinds starting at 25-50. Blind levels run 90 minutes in length until the final table, when they are truncated to one hour. Play becomes six-handed with 36 players remaining and, just like on the World Poker Tour circuit, the final table will also be six-handed. Antes kick in starting at Level 4, when the blinds will be 100-200.
On Monday, September 27th, Day 1-A of the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic will kick off at noon local time. There are two starting days; a champion will be crowned on Saturday, October 4th. The winner will join the ranks of Juha Helppi, Eric Brenes, Erick Lindgren, Freddie Deeb, Devon Miller, and Travis Rice, who represent the previous champions of the UB tournament.
The tournament takes place on the island of Aruba, which is located just off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea. It has a population of just over 100,000 and the majority of the country’s revenue is derived from tourism. All of the details of the Aruba Poker Classic are available at ArubaClassic.com.