Big Names Set To Play $258,000 Macau High Stakes Challenge

This Friday, August 31st will see one of the biggest buy-in in tournaments in poker history take place in Macau, featuring a HK$2,000,000 ($258,000 US dollars) buy-in with an optional HK$2,000,000 rebuy, which can be bought at anytime during the 4-level re-buy period as long as the player has no more than the 100,000-chip starting stack.

The Macau High Stakes Challenge, sponsored by Asian online poker site PokerAce and the Neptune Group, is being held at StarWorld Hotel’s Poker King Club, which has played host to the largest cash games in the world in recent years.

The Poker King Club has placed an 80-player cap on the field, and it the event organizers expect the cap to be reached. This would garner a prize pool of HK$160 million before rebuys, with the possibility of going as high as HK$320 million, or $41 million US dollars.

As a result, the first-place prize will likely end up between $5 million to $10 million in US dollars, making it the largest prize ever in a poker tournament outside of the Big One For One Drop and the WSOP main events of recent years.

As one might expect, this unbelievable high stakes action has drawn the attention of many of the games most notable nosebleed regulars. Confirmed participants include Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Sam Trickett, John Juanda, Erik Seidel, Johnny Chan, Joe Hachem, Nam Le and Andrew Robl.

The site of the tournament, the Poker King Club, has hosted incredibly high stakes cash games in recent years that featured Asian businessmen alongside many of poker’s biggest names. Rumors of multi-million dollar pots taking place in these games have tantalized the poker world.

For the most part, access to these gigantic games has been limited, but players have sometimes shared information through social networking sites. On Aug. 13th, Sam Trickett tweeted a photo of his chipstack in one of the cash games, with massive piles of HK$100,000 plaques totaling more than $14.3 million, or more than $1.8 million USD.

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