Poker's Elite In Macau For $250k One Day Super Turbo

Poker’s elite stars have now made their way to the world’s biggest gambling resort in Macau, China ahead of the $250k (HKD 2 million) buy-in turbo tournament known as the “Macau High Stakes Challenge.”
Held at the Starworld Casino’s Poker King Club, the one day event will take place on August 31st and will be capped at 80 players to create a minimum prize pool of $20 million. However, considering one rebuy will be available to the competitors, the estimated first place prize could easily rise from $5 million to around $7.5 million if just half the players choose to rebuy.
The tournament is a result of a collaboration between the Poker King Club, Asian Poker Tour (APT), PokerAce and Neptune, and as AsianLogic Chairman Tom Hall, a company which owns the APT, explains:
“This is the biggest first place by far in poker other than the WSOP Main Event and the WSOP recent US$1m One Drop. Nobody quite knows where we will end up, but a first [prize] of around US$5m should be expected.”
At present, Tom Hall anticipates around 70 players will attend the “Macau High Stakes Challenge,” with the field roughly consisting of 50 Asian businessmen, 10 Asian pros and a dozen or so Western poker pros. Included amongst the big names taking part will be Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Gus Hansen, Brian Rast, Erik Seidel, Igor Kurganov, Alexander Phillip Gruiben, John Juanda, Johnny Chan, Sam Trickett, Keith Gibson, Andrew Robl, Nam Le, Allan Le, Tommy Le and Joe Hachem.
The Macau High Stakes Challenge will be recorded and broadcast shortly after the tournament is completed. PokerAce intends to cover the event, as Gwenole Andrieux explains:
“We will release the content shortly after the event on the PokerAce website as we did for Manila Millions. It will be a series of short episodes made for the web. The show will also air later this year in the TV show Poker Secret on Lotus TV. We will also look at other TV opportunities to broadcast the game in the Asian region and worldwide as this is one of the most extraordinary tournaments that is taking place.”