The latest season of Party Poker's Premier League Poker starts this afternoon at the M Casino in Las Vegas, airing on Channel 4 in the UK in March. The buyin is $100,000 and consists of a series of 8-player heats among 12 players, earning points in an attempt to reach the final table (16-11-8-6-4-3-2-0). The top 4 finishers make the final table, 5th place plays 8th place, while 6th place faces the 7th place finisher to complete the final table. The lineup this year consists of:

JC Tran (defending champion)
Luke "FullFlush" Schwartz
Phil Laak
Yevgeniy Timoshenko
Phil Hellmuth
Daniel Negreanu
Tony G
Vanessa Rousso
David Benyamine
Roland de Wolfe
Ian Frazer (Team PartyPoker qualifier)
Giovanni Safina (PartyPoker.com qualifier)

Live updates for each heat will be available over at PokerNews.

The latest on FullFlush.

For those who come to this thread late, here's a couple of articles discussing this history of the Premier Poker League, a preview of this year's event, and explaining the selection process:

http://www.blackbeltpoker.com/articl...eague-Review-1
http://www.blackbeltpoker.com/articl...eague-Review-2

According to the video in the 2nd link, Benyamine is a red pro again?

Ian Frazer?? FFS!!

Kind of suprised that Devilfish is not taking part this year.

Yes, live updates over at PokerNews.

Scoring looks like this per heat:

1st: 17 points
2nd: 13 points
3rd: 10 points
4th: 8 points
5th: 7 points
6th: 5 points

Forget what I said earlier about the points breakdown. Here's all the info for the first heat.

Seat 1: Phil Laak
Seat 2: JC Tran
Seat 3: Vanessa Rousso
Seat 4: Yevgeniy Timoshenko
Seat 5: Ian Frazer
Seat 6: Luke Shwartz
Seat 7: Roland De Wolfe
Seat 8: Daniel Negreanu

Each player begins with 300,000 chips and blind levels will last 21 hands per round. For each eight-player heat, the players will earn points based on their finish as follows.

1st - 16 pts
2nd - 11 pts
3rd - 8 pts
4th - 6 pts
5th - 4 pts
6h - 3 pts
7th - 2 pts
8th - 0 pts

The points system is to help determine the final table. The top four points earners will automatically reach the final six-handed final table and then the next four spots (5th-8th) will play heads-up matches to try and win their way to the final. Fifth place will place eighth place and sixth place will play seventh place.

The total prizepool is $1.5 million. $900,000 of that is reserved for the final table while there will be $600,000 up for grabs during the preliminary heats. Here's how that prizepool will break down for each heat.

1st - $32,000
2nd - $22,000
3rd - $16,000
4th - $12,000
5th - $8,000
6h - $6,000
7th - $4,000
8th - $0

Why no Tom Dwan?

Looks like he is owning Timoshenko and company in the Premier League

http://www.pokernews.com/live-report...day1/page3.htm

thanks

never heard of him

Timoshenko - 3rd
Luke Schwartz - 5th

Suprised there's no posts regarding Heat 2 today (2/13/10)... Sick hand below...

Tran and Hellmuth Warring
JC Tran limped in with 5 4 and Phil Hellmuth attacked with a raise from the big blind to 30,000 with 102 Tran made the call.

The flop came A 9 2down and Hellmuth bet 35,000. Tran made the call with his gutshot and backdoor spades.

The turn was the 7 Hellmuth fired 48,000. Tran took some time and then raised to 123,000. Hellmuth now went into the tank. Eventually, he gave it up and Tran showed only the 4

Standings after two of six heats, each of the 12 players will appear in four heats:

1. Phil Laak – 32 points (played twice)
2. JC Tran – 17 points (played twice)
3. Roland De Wolfe – 14 points (played twice)
T-4. David Benyamine - 8 points
T-4. Yevgeniy Timoshenko – 8 points (played twice)
6. Vanessa Rousso – 6 points
T-7. Luke Schwartz – 4 points
T-7. Giovanni Safina - 4 points
9. Phil Hellmuth - 3 points
T-10. Ian Frazer – 2 points
T-10. Tony G - 2 points
12. Daniel Negreanu – 0 points

On Hellmuth's Twitter, he's now declared war on JC Tran (zzzzzz).

JC must be worried. in this format I'd take him over hellmuth all day long

That hand was pretty sick, as Hellmuth and Tran were going back and forth all day. After Hellmuth busted, he went off on a tirade and challenged Tran and anyone else to HU cash for "a lot of money". He was steaming hard.