While the Coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown leaves many of us bedraggled and bored, weighed down by wave after wave of nothingness, there is an equal number of people who are taking the time to smash bottles of Perrier water alongside the hull of brand new ships.
You don’t need to retch.
You need to react.
partypoker and Poker Central are reacting. Between them, they turned the potential of a Poker Masters Online Series into a $35.4m powerhouse that saw 124 unique poker players finish in the money (ITM) throughout 30-events where seven players accrue more than $1m gross, including the winner, Alexandros Kolonias, who finished with the Purple Jacket.
Rob Yong.
Cary Katz.
These aren’t people who take their foot off the gas.
So what next?
Super High Roller Bowl Online
partypoker and Poker Central have announced that the 2020 Super High Roller Bowl (SHRB) will move online.
Between May 23 – June 1, the world’s best poker players will gather on partypoker to compete in 28 events with buy-ins ranging from $10,000 – $100,000. The organisers promise $20m in guaranteed prize money and expect that to be doubled.
Two-day events are the staple menu, the first of which is a $25,500 buy-in, $1m GTD No-Limit Hold ’em (NLHE) 8-Max.
As with the Poker Masters Online Series, the player who accumulates the most points during the first 27-events is declared the champion and will collect an SHRB Championship ring and a free seat into the $102,000 Super High Roller Bowl Online, a two-day 8-max NLHE freezeout event with a 300,000 starting stack and a $3m guarantee.
Poker Central will stream ten of the final tables on PokerGO, and all the competitors will receive an annual subscription worth $99.
Cary Katz created Poker Central in 2015, and over time it became the ‘Netflix of Poker’, providing digital entertainment, on tap, for the global poker community. At $9.99 per month, it is as cheap as chips.
One of the strengths of digital services like Netflix or Amazon Prime is their ‘Original’ content. Poker Central began creating ‘Originals’ of their own. Still, it wasn’t until they began merging high stakes live tournaments with digital content that PokerGO became a must-have purchase for a fan of poker.
The Super High Roller Bowl will make a successful transition. There’s nowhere else high rollers can play, but it’s not the SHRB’s final resting place.
Katz loves live poker and plays more than most, so he will be champing at the bit to get the Poker Masters and SHRB back into the PokerGo Studios, but in the meantime, he will sit behind his computer and mash some buttons with the best of them.
Super High Roller Bowl History
The Super High Roller Bowl (SHRB) launched in 2015 and quickly became the most anticipated event in the poker calendar for high stakes players.
The first event became the most expensive in history outside of the $1m Big One for One Drop, and Brian Rast defeated 43-entrants to win the $7.5m first prize in Las Vegas.
The buy-in dropped to $300,000 for the next two years. In 2016, Rainer Kempe topped a field of 49-entrants to win the $5m first prize, and the following year Christoph Vogelsang defeated a then-record field of 56-entrants to claim the $6m first prize.
2018 was a busy year for SHRB organisers. The decision to change the spring date to winter saw two events in a calendar year. The first attracted 48-entrants and Justin Bonomo won the $5m first prize, and Ike Haxton bagged the second, beating 36-entrants to win the $3.6m first prize. It was also the first year that the SHRB brand went global with SHRB China pulling in a record 75-entrants, and Bonomo picked up his second major title of the year and $4.8m in prize money (Bonomo would also win the $1m Big One for One Drop in the same year).
The success of the Chinese tournament prompted Poker Central to partner with more established live tournament operators to showcase the SHRB event at their masthead competitions around the world. Cary Katz won SHRB London, and Daniel Dvoress won SHRB Bahamas. The form continued into 2020 when Timothy Adams became the first player to win two SHRB titles in both Australia and Russia.