LAS VEGAS /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — The WPT World Championship this week on the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake set some earth-shattering numbers of its own … a record 605 players, a prize pool of $15,125,000 dollars and $3.7 million for the winner!

The $25,500 buy-in tournament at Las Vegas’ Bellagio proved to be a lure to players from nearly 40 countries. The WPT now airs in 147 countries and territories, and as a result the winners will be feted in countries from Antigua to Zambia, and from Japan to Sweden.

The incentive attracting players is two-fold, to win the coveted title WPT World Champion and to go home with a portion of the record prize money. In fact, the three top-finishing players will all earn more than $1 million. And even for those further down the list, the tournament will pay 100 deep … so one in every six players will be in the money.

The WPT World Championship crowns the WPT’s fourth record-breaking season, bringing the total prize money for the 17 tournaments to $85,120,000.

Among those marquee players who took to the felt for the WPT World Championship were defending champion Tuan Le and Alan Goehring, plus T.J. Cloutier, Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, Doyle Brunson, Antonio “The Magician” Esfandiari, Jennifer Harman, Daniel Negreanu, Scotty Nguyen, Erick Lindgren, David Williams, Allen Cunningham, Men “The Master” Nguyen, Phil Ivey, Kathy Liebert, Chip Jett, Ted Forrest, Gavin Smith, Barry Greenstein, Paul Darden, Nick Schulman, Freddy Deeb, Jennifer Tilly, Michael Gracz, John D’Agostino, Hasan Habib and Scott Fischman.

Final table play will begin Monday, April 24th at 4 pm. The field of hopefuls will have been whittled down to six and from those six one will take home the $3,760,165 first prize. Second place will pay $1,903,950 and third place will pay $1,025,205.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 10:09 am and is filed under Poker Industry News, Poker Players, Poker Tournaments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.