World Poker Rank offers the most complete and accurate database of live poker tournament event results from casinos and poker rooms throughout the world to present the best rankings system and statistics of every poker player in the world who has placed in any poker tournament from 1970 to the present. WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic. Pavel Plesuv. Below are the results of the 2014 World Series of Poker, held from May 27-July 14 at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino in Paradise, Nevada. 3 days ago This week I have a hand to share that involves a tough preflop decision — to call or not to call a big preflop shove with pocket tens. The hand occurred during the $3,500 buy-in World Poker Tour.

Happy New Year everyone. Today I have another hand to share from the $3,500 buy-in World Poker Tour Borgata Main Event, one that provides us an opportunity to discuss value betting with strong hands.

The hand took place late on Day 2 just as we were approaching the money and began with a loose-aggressive player with 56,000 raising the minimum to 8,000 from the cutoff.

It folded to me in the small blind with a big stack of 278,000 and . Some players routinely three-bet when playing from the small blind, but in this case I had a tight player on my left in the big blind who I expected to fold a lot if I just called. So I called, the big blind did fold, and the flop came perfectly for me — to give me a straight.

Should I lead here? If so, how much? Should I check with a plan to check-raise? Or should I check-call and try to get chips in on a later street?

In this case I checked and my opponent did, too, then the turn meant I no longer had the nuts. That said, I thought this particular opponent would have likely bet his flush draws on the flop, which meant I wasn't too worried about not having the best hand.

From here the hand is all about value betting and finding the right bet sizes to try to win the maximum. Take a look at how things play out and hear my analysis:

Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $7,000,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. Sign up to learn poker from Jonathan for free at PokerCoaching.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.

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History of the World Poker Tour

The World Poker Tour (WPT) is an international poker tournament series, created in 2002 where only the final table of each event was broadcasted on TV. The WPT was created by Steven Lipscomb, the CEO of World Poker Tour Enterprise, who was an attorney and TV producer. His idea was to create high stakes tournaments and broadcast the final table with hole cards, so the viewer could see and understand everything that was going on, with professional commentary giving thoughts and explanations about what was going on at the table.

The WPT started in the end of 2002 and ran until April 2003, with the grand finale WPT Championship at the Bellagio Casino and Hotel. The first season of the WPT was aired on TV in the spring of 2003 and quickly became very popular.

The reason for the quick popularity was a mix of many different aspects such as the final table being with only six players creating a lot more action, players hole cards being showed while the hand was being played giving viewers a chance to understand what the players are going through and last but not least the popular commentary team of Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten. Mike and Vince did an excellent job of creating excitement among viewers, explain the rules and giving the viewer an understanding of the dynamics of the table. This combo made the WPT a favorite TV program for many people all over the world and was a very helpful hand in creating the poker boom in the early 00's.

The WPT began being broadcasted all over the world in its second season, hitting more than a 150 countries in total. The show was loved all over the world, being the first of its kind and with its professional setup. The Travel Channel was the official channel for the WPT in the US as well as being broadcasted via American Cable Television.

The transmission of the WPT resulted in more and more players playing the events in the casino, growing every year from its start until 2007. The WPT attracted all the biggest and most famous players in the world and also helped to make a lot of players more famous over the years. A player like Gus Hansen got known worldwide for being 'the crazy Dane' with his aggressive playing style compared to his American colleagues shocking the poker world at the time.

In 2007 the WPT and poker in general was at its highest, creating insane prize pools in the regular events and made the biggest win in WPT history at WPT Championship, which gave Carlos Mortensen almost $4 million in first prize. The WPT was the second biggest tournament series in the world after World Series of Poker (WSOP) at the time, but the following year’s recession hit everybody including the WPT. The recession caused smaller attendances and prize pools overall, but the WPT was still a popular series.

To expand the brand from being live poker only to online, WPT opened ClubWPT in 2008. ClubWPT is a subscription based site, where players play free tournaments and can win prizes for $100,000 each month. Since players were not playing with real money, it was legal for Americans to sign up and play on the site, giving the site instant success with its famous brand. The same year WPT decided to give winners of each event a bracelet as a extra token of their winnings, giving former winners a bracelet as well.

In November 2009 WPTE sold the rights to the WPT to PartyGaming for $12,300,000, changing the WPT from being an American based tournament series to the whole world instead. A major change television wise is that Vince Van Patten is no longer a commentary, but instead Mike Sexton got partnered up with Jesse May. PartyGaming quickly expanded the WPT to the rest of the world and especially Europe, creating lots of regular WPT as well as WPT regional events. WPT regional is a concept for smaller casinos, to get the WPT feeling with a smaller buy-in to cater more to the hobby players instead of professionals.

Today WPT is running events all over the world, becoming more and more popular outside America.

WPT Events

From the beginning of the WPT and until the acquisition from PartyGaming in 2009, the WPT tournaments were primarily hosted in American casinos all over the US. The WPT made a clear decision to primarily stay within the US to optimize the tournaments and to keep the cost as low as possible. If they would have to travel to Europe on a regular basis, the cost of production would become much higher than they wanted and the events in the US were more than enough popular to cover the demand from the viewers and players. Another reason was that Europe already had its own poker tour, the European Poker Tour (EPT), which travelled across all of Europe and had a more European feel.

When PartyGaming took over, they quickly decided to expand the tournament series to the whole world, with the brand being so famous it would be easy for them to advertise the tours. To cover as many different countries as possible, PartyGaming created WPT regional events together with their regular WPT events. The WPT regional was is tournaments mainly aimed at smaller casinos with hobby players, doing small buy-ins and large fields in opposition to the regular events which are expensive, have smaller fields and consist mainly of professionals.

The latest news event wise is the WPT Alpha 8, which is an exclusive high stakes tournament series, taking place in Europe, Africa, Asia and America. The tournaments have a buy-in of minimum $100,000, which leaves it for only the best players in the world to play the events. The events are all televised and feature a eight-player final table, instead of the regular six-man final table known from the WPT.

Today the WPT visits every continent in the world, more than 20 different countries and 35 casinos. This makes the WPT the tournament with most different destinations of them all and gives players all over the world the chance to play with the pros.

WPT Player of the year

After each season of the WPT, the WPT gi

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History of the World Poker Tour

WPT Events

WPT Player of the year

World Poker Tour Hand Rankings