WPT Venice down to final 36 players, $100,000 buy-in PLO tournament on PokerStars?

Normal day for Phil Hellmuth.

Ashton Griffin ready to play the $100k PLO Challenge.

The €3,300 buy-in World Poker Tour Venice Main Event is now down to final 36 players from the original 173 players that started the tournament.

Ludovic Lacay is currently leading the way with 351,400 in chips. There are also many well-known players left in the field, like Mike Sexton (241,500), Marvin Rettenmaier (187,800), Kara Scott (113,400), Liv Boeree (93,600) and Daniel "jungleman12" Cates (87,600).

Players like Galen Hall, Martin Staszko and Phil Hellmuth have instead all busted out already from the tournament in earlier days. Hellmuth's arrival to the tournament was quite peculiar - see the picture on the right that Hellmuth published on his Twitter.

A total of 21 players will end up in the money and the eventual winner will take home a nice $180,097.

See WTP.com for Live Updates.


PokerStars to host a $100,000 buy-in Pot-Limit Omaha Tournament?

Ashton "theASHMAN103" Griffin recently Tweeted the following: "Playing in this 100k 1 vs 1 pot limit omaha tourney in April. Should get about 8-12 players. I'm a big favorite to be the rustiest player."

Apparently PokerStars has contacted everyone who has played their highest PLO games during 2012, including Griffin, for a possible All-Star Showdown.

Here is the email that the players have supposedly received from PokerStars (the email was published by 2+2 user "RaineTech"):

"Dear Players,

I am writing this mail to everyone who has played in our highest PLO games during 2012 because I would like to hear from you regarding a possible All-Star Showdown for PLO. For those of you who don’t know, the All-Star Showdown is a Cash-Game style tournament where the participants play Heads-Up matches over four simultaneous tables. It is rake free, and players have to reveal their real names.

We just recently finished the Hold’em version of this tournament (http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/prom...star-showdown/) and felt that we learned a lot from that experience. The PLO version will be very similar, but we will try to avoid having players at the tables for 17 hours stretches as we did last time around.

So, for now we have a couple of questions. Would you be interested in playing in such a tournament with $100K buyin, and secondly, would April 2013 be a good period for it?

Best Regards
XXXXX
Poker Room Management"

We will keep you updated regarding the Showdown if/when new information will be released.