The children. WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?!

No child left behind.

The way poker is going, it has no chance.
The whole point of online is that it's something you can do at home.
With segregated player pools, it's doomed to failure.
With a global player pool, there's WCOOP to contend with. Good luck with that one.

I'm curious as to how the wifi at the Rio will perform during this event? Poor internet service in the Rio hotel rooms, or in the tournament area could become a mess.

Last year the service in rooms was weak at best. And when you have a technical issue you speak to an IT department off site that manages internet service for many hotels.

I understand the tournament doesn't require you to be at Rio, but it is where many players will be staying and/or playing. Could also see many players gather in rooms, at pool...wherever to play side by side. Could also be funny the number of tablets present in tournament and cash area. Multi-tabling tournaments at wsop could be interesting. Doubtful current wifi system is capable of handling that action with the speed necessary to produce a good on-line tournament experience.

It would guess it's scheduled for July 2nd because that's right before the Main Event starts and is therefore a time where tons of people will be in town and able to play. Additionally, it gives more opportunity for people who play in events throughout the WSOP to satellite into the event.

If I'm there this summer and register on wsop.com do I need a Vegas address? Or is it solely based on your ip? What if I'm playing it on a mobile device?

No, your address can be anywhere even out of the country. You just need to be physically in Nevada while you play. The mobile app is horrible and unusable.

I would assume that this is one of the first things that was brought up when they even started to consider something like this. I would think they have beefed up the IT on site for this fact. I really think how this tourney turns out will go a long way in WSOP.com saying, "see, online poker is great and we need to expand it nation wide" but if it goes poorly I could see this actually hurting the case for online poker in the USA.

Perhaps to retain the feel of an online tourney, the WSOP could bring the final table in to the thunderdome and provide each player with a laptop/tablet so that the integrity of the online tourney would be intact. Each player would need to login and identities could easily be verified via valid identification. It seems out of sorts to finish a tournament in another format. Live completion with cards and dealer is NOT an online table.

Confirmed that they are bringing at least the final 6 back to play live at ft.

I am completely okay with an online event offering a bracelet, but to have an event be partly online and party live is stupid.

Is the software ready for such an event ?

Maybe I'm ignorant, but I think the amount of colluding is pretty low in high stakes tables.
There MMT fields are so big that it has to be somewhat rare that two friends who are both stupid enough to collude get at the same table.

Letting someone coach you through a final table is probably more likely, and though it's not allowed, it's far less scummy.

Online poker is such a huge part of the general community that I think it makes very little sense to exclude them for bracelets, because the chances of shady/illegal behaviour is higher, but still rare.