Earlier this month, some Chinese television viewers noticed something a little bit different on their dials. Hitting the airwaves on Nanjing Entertainment Television in the Jiangsu province was the Traktor Poker Tour. A World Poker Tour sponsored tournament series, the Traktor Poker Tour became the “first government sanctioned nationally-televised poker competition in China,” according to a press release distributed by WPT officials on Friday.
Nine programming hours of Season I of the Traktor Poker Tour Grand Finals will air in total. The tournament series is also already in high gear for its second season. Last year, World Poker Tour Enterprises, which is the parent company of the highly-successful American poker franchise, inked a 10 year agreement with the China Leisure Sports Administrative Center (CLSAC) to market poker in China. It was one of the first ventures by the California-based company to expand a variation of its product outside of the traditional Texas Hold’em poker markets.
In a press release from August of last year, World Poker Tour Founder, President, and CEO Steve Lipscomb commented, “Poker, especially Tuo La Ji Poker, requires a great amount of skill and passion, both key ingredients in creating dynamic and engaging sports television. We look forward to applying our expertise revolutionizing televised poker in the United States to help bring this exciting sport to Chinese television for the first time.”
Since then, the WPT has focused on building internet and mobile platforms for its hallmark Chinese game. Traktor Poker uses two decks of cards with jokers and is a team competition. Points are accrued for the cards contained in each “trick” won by teams and trump suits also mix the game up.
Gambling in China is centered in Macau, where two major Asian poker tours, the PokerStars-sponsored Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) and the Asian Poker Tour (APT) both recently conducted tournaments. Yevgeniy Timoshenko, also known as “atimos” online, took down the 2008 installment of the APT Macau tournament, pocketing $500,000. He defeated Joon Hee Yea heads-up. The APT lured some of poker’s biggest stars to Macau, including “Texas Dolly” Doyle Brunson, his son Todd, APT Philippines winner David Saab, 10 time World Series of Poker bracelet winner Johnny Chan, PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker Main Event winner J.C. Tran, and 2008 WSOP Europe Main Event winner John Juanda.
The APPT Macau event was held in September and was won by American Edward Sabat, who took home $453,000. There were 538 entrants and also finishing in the money were David Chiu, Carter Gill, Quinn Do, Juanda, and Aussie Millions winner Lee Nelson. In both the APT and APPT events, the name of the game was Texas Hold’em.
In the United States, the World Poker Tour is gearing up for its Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic, which kicks off on December 13th from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. The $15,000 buy-in tournament will crown a champion six days later. Each player will start with 45,000 chips and blind levels will run for 90 minutes. Blinds start at 50-100 and antes kick in beginning in Level 3. In the WPT’s last tournament, Jonathan Little, who is known in the online poker world as “FieryJustice,” pocketed $1.1 million for his win in the Foxwoods World Poker Finals. Also at the final table were Jonathan Jaffe, Charles Marchese, David Pham, Jack Schanbacher, and Full Tilt Poker pro Mike Matusow.
