Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 05 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

Today begins the sixth annual NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, a 64-player single-elimination tournament that somewhat imitates the format of the NCAA college basketball tournament that takes place every March in the United States. Kind of poker's version of "March Madness" (as the basketball tourney is often called).

Given the generally unpredictable nature of scheduling on the professional poker tourney circuit, the fact that the NBC Heads-Up event has lasted six years is noteworthy. Its debut in March 2005 was the result of at least a couple of factors.

One was the sudden popularity of televised poker spawned by the debut of the World Poker Tour in 2003 and ESPN's coverage of the WSOP later that same year. Additionally, the National Hockey League lockout of 2004-05 opened up a hole in weekend programming at NBC that a relatively cheap-to-produce poker tournament was able to fill.

In 2005, the Heads-Up Championship took place at the famed Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas, then in subsequent years has been held at Caesars Palace on the strip. The tourney began as an invite-only affair, then eventually evolved into something slightly different, although many of those who will be putting up the $20,000 entry fee this weekend have been invited to do so.

Aside from the seven online qualifiers who won their spots in this weekend's tourney, nearly two dozen others will have earned their seats after having met various criteria for qualifying outlined by tourney organizers. For example, the five previous winners of the event have all been invited back: Phil Hellmuth (2005), Ted Forrest (2006), Paul Wasicka (2007), Chris Ferguson (2008), and Huck Seed (2009). Those who have made deep, recent runs qualify, too, including the last two runner-ups (Vanessa Rousso and Andy Bloch) and last year's semi-finalists (Sam Farha and Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier).

Players who distinguished themselves in various ways during 2009 also receive "bids" (so to speak), including last year's 2009 EPT Grand Final winner Pieter de Korver, the 2009 CardPlayer Player of the Year Eric Baldwin, the 2009 Bluff Magazine POY Jason Mercier, winner of $10,000 heads-up bracelet event at last year's WSOP Leo Wolpert, and the 2009 WSOP Main Event runner-up Darvin Moon. Players earning multiple bracelets at the 2009 WSOP also earned invites, a group that includes Phil Ivey, Greg Mueller, Brock Parker, and J.P. Kelly (who one a bracelet at both the WSOP and WSOPE last year).

Jeffrey Lisandro also earned an invite in two ways -- by winning three WSOP bracelets in 2009 as well as being named the WSOP Player of the Year. However, he has declined the invitation, as has Barry Shulman, who earned a spot thanks to his WSOPE Main Event triumph last fall. Finally, according to the criteria established prior to last year's Heads-Up Championship, the three previous WSOP Main Event winners all have the chance to play as well: Jerry Yang (2007), Peter Eastgate (2008), and Joe Cada (2009).

With Lisandro and Shulman withdrawing, then, that leaves 36 "at-large" spots to be filled by invitation. This is where the tourney generally invites controversy, with some selections clearly guided more by hopes to encourage viewership than necessarily to assemble the greatest collection of hold'em tourney players possible.

Here are the 36 who received invites: Patrik Antonius, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Don Cheadle, Allen Cunningham, Annie Duke, Tom Dwan, Eli Elezra, Antonio Esfandiari, Jamie Gold, Phil Gordon, Barry Greenstein, Joe Hachem, Gus Hansen, Jennifer Harman, Orel Hershiser, Jesper Hougaard, John Juanda, Gabe Kaplan, Phil Laak, Howard Lederer, Erick Lindgren, Mike Matusow, Dario Minieri, Chris Moneymaker, Daniel Negreanu, Scotty Nguyen, Annette Obrestad, Dennis Phillips, Greg Raymer, Kara Scott, Erik Seidel, Mike Sexton, Gavin Smith, Jennifer Tilly, and David Williams.

As happens with NCAA basketball tournament every year -- also comprised of automatic qualifiers and teams receiving "at-large" bids -- debates over the 2010 NBC Heads-Up field have already begun regarding the decisions to include certain players while excluding others. Probably the most frequently mentioned slight from this year's field has been Yevgeniy Timoshenko, winner of both the 2009 World Poker Tour Championship (in April) and the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker Main Event (in September).

As long as over half of the field is made up of invites, the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship will never be considered a wholly legitimate test to determine poker's elite. Then again, even NCAA's March Madness -- or any single-elimination tourney -- is necessarily going to be an imperfect measure of skill and/or achievement.

The NBC Heads-Up event does, however, has something going for it. In some respects, the event evokes the memory of the old Tournament of Champions, that tournament originally envisioned by Mike Sexton as an event bringing together the past year's highest achievers. And despite the relatively fast structure (15-minute levels, rapidly increasing blinds) and the element of luck associated with the heads-up format, winning the tournament certainly represents an achievement worth recognizing.

Once the tourney plays out this weekend, it will air on consecutive Sundays on NBC from mid-April until late May -- ending just before the start of this summer's WSOP. Half a million dollars await the winner, along with the trophy pictured above (photo courtesy the great Flipchip).

Even if the Heads-Up Championship is perhaps more about packaging watchable counterprogramming for a few Sunday afternoons than a pure test of poker skill, I know I'll nevertheless once again be curious to see how it all turns out.

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