Get Ready for Some Mega High-Stakes Poker Action!
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Welcome to the big, bad kickoff to PokerNews' coverage of the 2015 PokerStars and Monte-Carlo® Casino European Poker Tour Grand Final!
Today marks Day 1 of the €100,000 Super High Roller, one of the largest buy-ins the yearly tournament circuit has to offer. As always in this marquee event, a highly elite field is expected, including the likes of Antonio Esfandiari, Dan Smith, Daniel Negreanu, Erik Seidel, Jason Mercier, Isaac Haxton, Max Altergott, Mike McDonald, Phil Ivey, Sam Trickett, and Talal Shakerchi.
Last year, Daniel Colman topped a field of 62 entries, and the field size has generated steady increase each year. The first installment in 2012 was won by Justin Bonomo after he topped 45 entries, then in 2013 it was Max Altergott topped a field of 50 entries. That's an 11-percent increase from 2012 to 2013 and a 24-percent increase from 2013 to 2014. If you average those increases out to 17.5 percent and project that onto 2015's field, you're looking at over 70 entries this year.
We mentioned a handful of notables expected to be in the field, but it's not one of those that we'd like to focus on for one of our main points of interest.
Anthony Zinno, winner of three World Poker Tour titles, will be popping his PokerStars super high roller cherry. To our knowledge, he's never played an event with a buy-in of $100,000 or greater, and it will be exciting to see the player hotter than anyone else right now lock horns with what is one of the toughest fields to overcome in poker.
Zinno's already having a career year with just shy of $1.6 million in live earnings, but the average talent gap in a WPT main event versus a PokerStars super high roller is very large. It comes of large interest to see if he can perform well against the type of elite competition he'll be going toe to toe with in Monaco.
Today's event kicks off at 12:30 p.m. local time, and players will begin with 250,000 in tournament chips. Sixty-minute levels are on the docket, Day 1 will consist of eight levels, and registration and unlimited reentries will be allowed until the start of Day 2. There will be a 20-minute break after the second and fourth levels, and a 30-minute break after the sixth level.
In the previous three installments of this event, the top five finishers have gone on to cash in the event 40% of the time. That means a solid Day 1 performance can prove to be very lucrative for a player, so you'll surely want to stay glued right here to follow along.