Heads Up Championship This Weekend

The 2008 National Heads Up Poker Championship will be taking place this weekend at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. There will be a total of 64 players in the single elimination bracket formatted event.

Only three of the 64 players are unknowns as they made the event through poker qualifiers.

The other 61 players are either well-know poker pros or celebrities. The drawing party for the brackets will take place at the Pure nightclub on Thursday, February 28th. The event will begin on Friday. First prize in the Heads Up Poker Championship is a half million dollars. Second place is a quarter million while fourth place is $125,000. Fifth place to eight place pays $75,000 each. 9th to 16th place pays $25,000. The total prize pool is $1.5 million dollars as each of the entrants had to put up $20,000.

The Heads Up Poker Championship is scheduled to air on NBC on April 13th and will run each Sunday with the Final on May 18th. The only player that was originally scheduled to play in the tournament but pulled out was celebrity Brad Garrett. He was replaced by Andy Bloch who should have been invited to begin with. Another late invitation went to Chris Moneymaker who is known for his WSOP win but has done nothing since. The celebrities in the field include Shannon Elizabeth who is also a good poker player, Jason Alexander and Don Cheadle.

The list of poker pros is a who’s who of poker. Former WSOP winners Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth Jr., Chris Ferguson, Jamie Gold, Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer and Jerry Yang are all part of the field. Other poker pros of note include Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, Ted Forrest and others.

In other poker news the LA Classic main event is underway. The poker tournament is down to the final few tables with a few poker pros in contention for the title including Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, Alan Goehring, Nam Le, David Singer and Jennifer Tilly. Ivey and Tilly were in the top three in chips after day three.