Every season of the
World Poker Tour has featured at least one tournament in a tropical location, breaking the normal confines of windowless casino poker. For season six, the
WPT visits the Turks and Caicos Islands for the first time, setting up at Club Med. To encourage attendance, the inaugural
Turks and Caicos Poker Classic featured a guaranteed $1 million prize for first place - an impressive prize for a $7,500 buy-in event. That million dollars would become the hot topic of the day.
Six days of poker were originally scheduled, with two separate starting days. But with a relatively small turnout for a
WPT event, organizers decided to have everyone start at once - converting day one (A) into a day off, and turning day one (B) into a good old-fashioned day one.
Play began on Wednesday at about 12:35 p.m. with 115 players. When registration finally closed around 4 p.m., the field had reached 137, creating a total prize pool around a million dollars. Since the
WPT doesn't allow deals for the prize money, the prize structure would have given promised $1 million prize for first place, but $0 for everyone else (paying just 0.73 percent of the field, compared to a standard 8-10 percent).
Tournament Director Jack McClelland felt that the best solution was to have the players vote on the prize structure - did they want to keep the million dollars for first place or spread the wealth a bit? McClelland offered separate prize structures based on paying the top nine or 10 places, the top six, or keeping it as a winner-take-all event.
In the first round of voting, just 16 out of 99 votes were cast to keep the winner-take-all format. The majority voted for either paying nine or six places, so a runoff was held between those two options. In the second round of voting, 72 percent of the players chose to pay the top nine places. Here is the agreed-upon official prize structure:
First - $436,675
Second - $225,000
Third - $125,000
Fourth - $70,000
Fifth - $50,000
Sixth - $30,000
Seventh - $25,000
Eighth - $20,000
Ninth - $15,000
There was no vocal dissent against breaking up the first-place guarantee. Speaking with a few of the 16 players who originally voted for winner-take-all, their attitude seemed more experimental ("Wouldn't it be cool?") or confident ("I plan to win, so why not put all of the money in first place?") than anything else. Once the revised payout structure was announced, we didn't hear complaints from any of the players.
Of course, the money bubble is still a few days away; first, there's a little matter of surviving day one.
It was a pro-heavy field, with most tables featuring three or four notable players. Current
Card Player cover-boy
Victor Ramdin was the first casualty of the day, just 10 minutes after play began.
Rami "ARBIANIGHT" Boukai flopped a full house (nines full of eights), and when Ramdin turned a lower full house (eights full of tens), his fate was sealed. The chip stacks were counted down, and Boukai had enough chips to send Ramdin to the beach. Boukai followed that early momentum with a strong day to finish in the top 10.
Day one would be relatively quick (just four levels), and action ended around 7:30 p.m. That was enough time to shrink the field down from 137 players to 84. Here's a look at the top 10 chip leaders, along with some notables further back in the pack. (The average chip count is about $32,600.)
1.
Mark Seif - $91,225
2. Lou White - $90,050
3.
Maros "Premier" Lechman - $88,100
4.
Perry Friedman - $79,575
5. Hieu Nguyen - $78,000
6.
Erik Cajelais - $76,850
7.
Michael Mizrachi - $75,050
8.
Fred Berger - $67,250
9. Rami "ARBIANIGHT" Boukai - $64,125
10.
Johan Storakers - $63,400
12.
Evelyn Ng - $56,800
19. Steve Sung - $41,500
23.
Haralabos Voulgaris - $38,475
25.
Nam Le - $38,275
29.
Danny Wong - $33,925
45.
Joe Sebok - $26,250
70.
Gavin Smith - $15,850
72.
Mike Matusow - $14,175
73.
Amnon Filippi - $13,775
75.
Bill Edler - $12,350
Action resumes on Thursday (day two) at 2 p.m. ET, giving the players a little extra time to enjoy the morning sun (or stay out a little later at night). Return to
CardPlayer.com for continuing live coverage of all the action.
