The ANZPT - an exciting new tournament
The new ANZPT
PokerStars have started a new tour, the ANZPT.
Held in locations across Australia and New Zealand, the southern hemisphere has finally got a serious set of tournaments.
The biggest poker website in the world, www.pokerstars.com, is bringing a new poker tour to Australia and New Zealand, the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour or ANZPT. Over the past few years poker has been growing in popularity in Australia and New Zealand due to events such as the Aussie Millions and APPT Auckland. The new tour will start in Adelaide as part of the Sky City Adelaide Hold’em Championship.
According to Danny McDonald the tournament’s spokesperson, “Following the success of the second season of the APPT earlier this year we are excited to be expanding poker further throughout this region” further commenting that “The ANZPT will provide Australian and New Zealand poker players with a professionally executed tour in their own backyard.”
Since the Sky City Casino first introduced Texas Hold’em in 1987, Adelaide has been considered by many as the “Home of Australian Poker” and as such is probably the most suitable location for the tour. Many of Poker’s best players are due to join the tour, including PokerStars.net Australian team members Grant Levy, Eric Assadourian, Celina Lin, Tony Hachem and Emad Tahtou who are due to play at up to six different locations.
The first event of the tour in Adelaide has a $3,000 direct buy-in and begins on February 4th and ends February 7th. PokerStars.com are running qualifiers for the event and offering packages worth over $4,500 including the buy-in, five night’s accommodation at the Hyatt Hotel in Adelaide and travel expenses. It is a league based tour, this means that there is a point system and players are awarded points for every event they enter and for the position they finish in, the first season runs until July.
Following on from the event in Adelaide there will be a tournament in Sydney at the Star City Casino running from April 30th – May 3rd with a buy in of $2,200 and finally an event in the Queenstown Sky City casino with a buy-in of $2,500 and a date in June still to be confirmed. These events will be accompanied by similar qualifiers with packages on offer as are being run for the Adelaide event.
There is around $85,000 in prizes to be awarded to the overall top three players of the ANZPT points programme. The player with the highest amount of points at the end of all three tournaments will win a one year sponsorship to the Asia Pacific Poker tour with a total value of around $50,000. There are also sponsorship prizes for the two runners up.
This tournament is the latest of many region-specific tours that PokerStars has created in the last few years joining events such as the Russian Poker Tour and the Filipino Poker Tour. More information on the tour can be found at its official website www.anzpt.com .
