The money or the title? The cash or the glory? We all play poker tournaments for different reasons but it's the age-old question - would you prefer to take home the top prize or the trophy?
It's possibly a question that many players in Australasia had to consider before playing in today's ANZPT Repechage event. With the World Series of Poker kicking off in Las Vegas, the lure of a bracelet would be very enticing for many. But when you weigh up the struggling US dollar, potential withholding tax implications, the massive minefields of people you need to wade through, and the expenses of two months living in Sin City, heading to the WSOP for an Aussie in late May does appear to be a trip in glory hunting.
However when you consider the ANZPT Repechage Main Event offers a $750,000 prize pool guarantee, next week Macau is hosting one of the richest poker tournaments in the world with the Guangdong Asia Millions, closely followed by the APPT Macau championships, the Asia-Pacific region is thriving with plenty of fruitful tournaments for local players to dig their teeth into at this time of the year.
Additionally, we've just been told that there were a bunch of overseas online qualifiers for the ANZPT Repechage event. They see cheap satellites running online on PokerStars, jump in and then later realise that Melbourne is a long, long way away. Oops! With over 30 overseas qualifiers in today's flight alone, and most likely to not show up, it means there are currently plenty of dead stacks on the tables as play gets underway on Day 1a. That's great news for our players as the money stays in the prize pool to give everyone a nice overlay.
A few notables who are taking advantage of that in today's flight include Andrew Hinrichsen, Daniel Neilson, Mishel Anunu, Martin Kozlov, Patrick Healy, Trung Tran, Aaron Benton, Eric Assadourian, Michael Kanaan, Amanda De Cesare, Tony Kondevski, Ricky Kroesen, Josh Barrett, Ashley Warner, Tony Tartaglia, Dale Marsland and Ivan Zalac. Currently there are around 190 entrants for the Day 1a flight.
Today's structure is also a little unusual due to the repechage format. We'll be playing a total of 13 levels today which sounds like a lot, and it is, but the idea is to reduce our field as much as possible in the hopes that they will re-enter again on one of the later flights to boost the prize pool. We won't be here until 7am though, as the levels will only be 30 minutes for the first four levels, and then 40 minutes for the rest of day. On Day 2 the structure will improve to 60-minute levels while Day 3 will enjoy 75-minute levels.
It means we're in for an exciting day of poker where players will be forced to create action and likely gamble late in the day in the quest to build a big stack!