Best Live Poker Tournaments
The two largest and most well-known live poker tournaments in the USA are the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour championship events – both of which are held in Las Vegas.
In Europe, the largest and most well-known tournament is the European Poker Tour. It’s now grown to become the largest poker tour in the world, in terms of total online gambling players and prize pool.
In Asia, the most well-known tournament is the Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau event, whereas in Australia, that honor goes to Aussie Millions (also known as the Crown Australian Poker Championship).
By far, the biggest live poker tournament is the World Series of Poker, which started in the early 1970s. If you win a WSOP Main Event, it’s your shoo-in to a page in the poker-history books. In 2004, the ubiquitous Harrah’s Entertainment – which owns Las Vegas’ Caesar’s Palace – acquired the rights to the World Series of Poker.
World Poker Tour can be credited as being one of the major reason why poker boomed in the early 2000s due in no large part to the many televised WPT events on ESPN.
WPT is comprised of a number of individual tournaments around the world – poker players collect points in these events and at the end of the year, a WPT champion is crowned. In the past, some recent champions have been Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu and Erick Lindgren.
Up until November 2009, WPT was controlled World Poker Tour Enterprises (WPTE). In November 2009, PartyGaming acquired the brand from WPTE for a cool $12,300,000.
European Poker Tour is the European version of World Poker Tour. The first ever EPT tournament played out in 2004, with cheaper buy-ins than WPT’s. During the last few seasons, though, the stakes have been raised. EPT now receives the same recognition as the other bigwigs do.
Special mention goes out to PokerStars, which hosts the EPT.
