The Great British Poker Tour Grand Final Kicks Off Tomorrow

Poker pro Jennifer Tilly is scheduled to be in the field for the Great British Poker Tour Grand Final tomorrow. (Bodog Beat Image)

The final event of the Great British Poker Tour begins tomorrow and wraps up what has been a successful inaugural year for the series. So far, five event champions have been crowned over the past nine months with the events themselves drawing a total of 550 entrants and a whopping £321,640 ($636,751) in prize money.

This Grand Final, which is being held at the Gala Casino Harbourside in Bristol, promises to be a fitting end to this first season. In attendance will be UK poker pros like Roland de Wolfe, Raw Vaswani, Barney Boatman and Joe Beevers who will be set on keeping the first GBPT Grand Final title on home soil against a number of U.S. poker pros making a trip across the pond to participate including Phil Laak, Antonio Esfandiari, Jennifer Tilly, Robert Williamson III and 2005 WSOP Main Event champion Jamie Gold.

The buy-in for this final event is £2,550 ($5,318) and should deliver an estimated first-place prize of £165,000 ($344,107). Along with the main prize pool, the top five players in the tournament will be given special bonus prizes including travel and entry packages to major worldwide poker tournaments.

Along those lines, Bodog just happens to also be qualifying people to win entry packages into worldwide poker tournaments on a daily basis. The Bodog "Player's Choice" package semifinals award at least one $12,000 prize per week and qualifiers to that tournament can be entered for as little as $1.