The Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open $5,250 No-Limit Hold’em Championship with a guaranteed prize pool of $5 million, or the festival’s most highly anticipated tournament, kicked off on Saturday at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood. The event is scheduled to be played over four days at the host venue, which means that a winner will likely be announced on August 16.
Day 1 of the prestigious tournament saw a total of 847 entries paying the $5,250 buy-in fee and doing their best to survive. The prize pool generated out of fees was just shy of the originally announced $5-million mark.
As many as ten one-hour levels were played on Saturday. The field was reduced to 279 remaining players by the end of the day. Poker pro Joseph Serock from Albuquerque, New Mexico was the player to bag the most chips on Saturday evening.
Serock is a player with quite a lot of experience on the live circuit. Over the past several years, he has taken part in different World Series of Poker, World Poker Tour, Heartland Poker Tour, and Hollywood Poker Open events, among many others. With live tournament earnings of more than $3 million, Serock is his home state’s most profitable poker player of all time. He collected his biggest live cash of $341,783 back in 2009, when he finished runner-up to John Parker in the $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Handed.
Day 2 of the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open Main Event is slated to start today at noon local time. Serock will be joined by notables like Ankush Mandavia, Faraz Jaka, Gil Haim, and Shaun Deeb at the host venue’s poker tables.
There were, however, top poker pros who could not survive throughout Day 1, with 2010 WSOP Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel, 2015 WSOP Main Event Champion Joe McKeehen, Bryn Kenney, and Dan O’Brien being few of those.
Players will play ten more one-hour levels today. As mentioned above, there are 279 hopefuls still in contention. This certainly means that the money bubble will burst today. The top 150 finishers will be paid their share of the Main Event’s prize pool, with lowest payouts starting from $7,500. The champion is set to receive $1 million in prize money. Each of the nine final table players is guaranteed a minimum cash of $75,000.
