Guy Laliberte, creator of Cirque du Soleil and OneDrop.org, has arranged for a 2012 WSOP event with a one-million-dollar buyin. About 10% of the buyin will go directly to the OneDrop water-suppyling charity.
This is the biggest public buyin in the history of poker tournaments. Guy and Las Vegas tycoon Phil Ruffin are committed to the event, and high-stakes players like Tom Dwan, Gus Hansen and Patrik Antonius have expressed a commitment to this historic tournament.
Lots of people are complaining that Guy is arranging a $1 million buyin tournament when players’ money is tied up on Full Tilt Poker. Sure, it’s bad that people can’t get their money off of Full Tilt, but that doesn’t mean the world stops turning. Victims around the world are dying without water, and poker players are moaning because they have some money tied up on a poker site. No businessman like Guy Laliberte owes a poker player anything, certainly not to the extent of risking his own money in a poker site with owners just indicted for about one billion dollars. Like any successful businessman would want such a site.
“Haters gonna hate” has perhaps never been more approriate than this situation.
On the other hand, this should not be a bracelet event. It was not clear to me from the press conference (although I may have missed it) whether this will actually be a bracelet event at the 2012 series. It’s already a borderline decision to make a $50,000 Players Championship a bracelet event because only rich individuals, people who can get staked and total degens can enter such an event. But a $1,000,000 buyin event is essentially a billionaire’s game with a few total degens and people scrounging the world for staking deals that get extremely lucky enough to raise the buyin amount. This is as close to buying a bracelet as you can get.
To conclude, one million dollars is a huge amount and it is a chance that many would kill and die for or even sacrifice their limbs but Laliberte is clever enough to include some excellent matches for that big a prize because he is a charitable person as mentioned above and you can’t expect your usual game of dominoqq with him as he likes to catch bigger fishes in the pond.
