- Daniel Negreanu has proposed a format for an Olympic style team poker tournament.
- He suggests six teams of six players from the six major poker playing countries.
- A $50k buy in—$300k per team—would produce a prize pool of $1.8m.
Daniel Negreanu has proposed a format for an Olympic style team poker tournament. He suggests six teams of six players from the six major poker playing countries.
A $50k buyin—$300k per team—would produce a prize pool of $1.8m. The event would play out over four days, with two preliminary heats a day, one starting at noon, the second at 8pm until six heats had been completed.
The preliminary heats start each player with 100k chips and all 36 players will play one heat. For the final, teams would carry forward their chip stacks from the heats and move into team play mode.
For the first six blind levels of the final, each player in a team must play one level. Thereafter, teams can decide who plays each level, so long as the player is replaced by another team member at the end of the level.
Daniel ends: “This would be so much fun and the final table would be extremely skillful and deep!”
He proposes the following teams and team members:
USA — Smith, Mercier, Selbst, Seidel, Raghavan, Volpe, Kenney
Canada — Negreanu, McDonald, Mizzi, Duhamel, Watson
Germany — Shemion, Rettenmaier, Gruissem
UK — Chidwick — Vamplew, Lewis, Silver, Ziyard, Kamel
Russia — Bilokur, Puchkov, Gulyy, Lahkov, Kurganov, Vitkind
France — Hairabedian, Grospellier, Pecheux, Ktorza, Lacey, Pollack
Team based poker tournaments have not achieved much success when they have been tried in the past. Perhaps Negreanu’s new status as GPI Player of the Decade, the very large amount of money at stake and the contemporary Olympic theme, could make this plan a winner.
