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HEADLINE: Bellagio Is Capital of Poker World in April

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The Five Star World Poker Classic Is now Taking Place

On Saturday, the fifth installment of the World Poker Tour’s Five Star World Poker Classic began a monthlong celebration of tournament poker at the Bellagio that will climax with one of the largest buy-in events in the world in two and a half weeks with its $25,000 championship event.

Leading up to the $25,000 event are 11 tourneys with buy-ins none less than $1,590. The first $1,590 event, a no-limit hold’em contest, took place this weekend, attracted 589 players, generated a prize pool of $856,995 and was won by Motoyuki Mabuchi. The top prize was $274,950.

Eric Mizrachi, Danny Wong, and David Sklansky all finished in the top 20, and they were only a few of the popular poker professionals who played in the event.

Today, the $2,100 no-limit event heads to its conclusion, an event that had 288 players register. The top prize is $206,795. Men “the Master” Nguyen, Brandon Cantu, Allen Kessler, Peter Rho, and Tommy Hang are all still in it.

Please click here to view CardPlayer.com’s live updates of this event. Play resumes at 3 p.m. PDT.

The $2,620 no-limit event started earlier today (April 9), and the field is loaded with huge names. A small sampling includes John Gale, Kenna James, J.C. Alvarado, Gavin Smith, Danny Wong, Erik Seidel, Rene Angelil, Shannon Shorr, Paul "Eskimo" Clark, Mark Seif, Barry Shulman, Joe Sebok, David Singer, J.J. Liu, J.C. Tran, Bill Edler, Barry Greenstein, and Erick Lindgren.

Please click here to view the live updates from this event.

Tomorrow, the $3,120 no-limit event is scheduled to begin followed by a $5,180 event Wednesday and a $1,590 event on Friday. Saturday has a $2,100 event scheduled to take place.

Next week, tournaments costing $2,100, $2,620, $3,120, and $5,180 all take place. Check CardPlayer.com’s tournament listing page here to view the entire schedule.

The $25,000 WPT Championship event starts Friday, April 21, with the final table set to take place a week later (Friday, April 27). Besides the World Series of Poker’s main event, the WPT Championship is the maybe the most prestigious of all the world’s events.

The player fields are always substantial, which make the payouts enormous. Last year, Joe Bartholdi won the event and its more than $3.7 million top prize. The event had 605 registrants who generated a prize pool of more than $14.6 million. (Those who entered included every winner of the tournaments featured in the fourth season of the WPT.)

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