World Poker Tour - The Definitive World Poker Tournament Circuit
A couple of years ago, the WPT created what I though would be the future of professional tournament poker when they launched the Professional Poker Tour.
The idea of this tour was to showcase the best poker talent in the world by creating a poker circuit for pros. Only players who qualified by winning tournaments or through voting were permitted to play.
As appealing as this was to me, the Professional Poker Tour fizzled after just two years, with most of the events being folded back into the World Poker Tour tournament schedule.
Fans apparently still love the idea of amateurs being able to come from nowhere to capture million dollar tournament prizes.
Despite the demise of the Professional Poker Tour, the WPT remains the nearest thing to a professional world poker tournament in existence. And with a little tweaking, I think that it could create a true annual “world champion” that would have far more legitimacy than the annual World Series of Poker winner.
Currently, the WPT hosts a series of televised $10,000 buy-in championship no limit hold’em tournaments along with lower buy-in, non-televised events.
Each season ends with the World Poker Tour World Championship, an event that sports a field of around 450 players.
You can either win your way into this event by winning one of the other WPT championship tournaments or pay the $25,000 buy-in.
I think the smaller field created by the high buy-in of the WPT World Championship makes for a better tournament than the circus-like World Series of Poker, but to create a true world champion the WPT needs to put together a championship tournament in which invitees are chosen completely on merit. This could either be based on WPT winnings or a points system.
Even without a system like this in place, the World Poker Tour remains the pinnacle of professional tournament poker. If you wanted to rank the top no limit holdem tournament players in the world, a list of WPT earnings would be a great place to start.
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