Its been all go over the last two weeks with live qualifiers in Newcastle, London and Dublin. These have been well attended and we have covered the seats and had significant prize money on all of them. I'm starting to get nervous again as we approach the cut off for the invited pro's to accept and, as we found last year, we are sure to have some players that have confirmed their place withdrawing for various reasons.
We need 44 pros to play against the 8 online and 4 live qualifiers and at the moment we have 37 and we are really pleased with the feedback from those that have accepted. When designing the event last year we set out to improve the TV tournament from a player perspective and the added money, great tournament structure and payment of travel expenses has made the players feel welcome and wanted... no charging the players for the dealers in this comp!!!
Here is the current list of pro's that have agreed to play. As I mentioned there may be a couple of drop outs nearer the cut off time but at the moment this is the confirmed line up.
Phil Laak (USA)
Antonio Esfandiar (USA)
Brian Wilson (USA)
Robert Williamson III (USA)
Dave 'Devilfish' Ulliott (GB)
Ram Vaswani (GB)
Joe Beevers (GB)
Barny Boatman (GB)
Ross Boatman (GB)
Ben Roberts (GB)
Dave Colclough (GB)
Peter Costa (GB)
Marc Goodwin (GB)
Harry Demetriou (GB)
Keith Hawkins (GB)
Roy Brindley (GB)
Willie Tann (GB)
Mickey Wernick (GB)
JP Kelly (GB)
Roland de Wolfe (GB)
Julian Gardner (GB)
Surinder Sunar (GB)
Tony Bloom (GB)
Xuyen Pham (GB)
Julian Thew (GB)
Steve Vladar (GB)
Liam Flood (IRE)
Andy Black (IRE)
Sean Murphy (IRE)
Peter Roche (IRE)
Pascal Perrault (FRA)
Tony G (AUS)
Ken Lennaard (SWE)
Christer Johansson (SWE)
Juha Helppi (FIN)
Tore Lagerborg (NOR)
Jonny Lodden (NOR)
I am over the moon as they say in footy circles.
We are off to Birmingham on Weds Sept 27th for the final live qualifier (£100 rebuy) and with a capacity of 100 players I am pretty sure this will sell out and give good prize money to the placed players. There is also one online qualifier left with two seats to the main event, this takes place this Sunday on the Hill's poker site. The buy-in is £120 plus reg fee and there are loads of small stakes qualifiers into this running every day.
It will be good to see you all in Birmingham.
