The Aussie Millions is due to get underway next week with 20 events on the schedule for its 2014 installment, including the prestigious $10,000 Main Event beginning February 2nd. Whoever manages to win that title is likely to walk away with somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 million, yet, oddly enough, unlikely to win the biggest prize of the series. That honor is much more likely to go to the winner of the $250,000 Challenge, one of three different events with bigger price tags than the main event. If you think this sounds like just another continuation of the recent trend of earnings-inflating high roller tournaments, you’re wrong – it’s poker’s annual return to the birthplace of such tourneys.
The gold standard buy-in for poker tournaments was set at $10,000 back in 1970 by World Series of Poker creator Benny Binion. Like many of Binion’s creations, this one held sway long after its creator was no longer on the scene. The poker boom was fueled by tournaments with that nice, round figure for a buy-in. Inflation meant that a $10K buy-in no longer implied quite as much wealth as it had in the glory days, but it did allow for tournaments to regularly award top prizes of at least $1,000,000. Few numbers carry the kind of psychological weight as a million – for proof, just look at the WSOP’s “Millionaire Maker” event and the WPT’s trademarked list of its Poker Made Millionaires(tm).
When the trend of nearly every major tournament sporting a $10K buy-in finally changed it was not to revise upward, but downward toward the $3K-5K range. This was a response to the disappearance of cheap online satellites for American players that kept most tournaments afloat, but the business of making millionaires with a single tournament was out the window. A cloud settled in over the business as it began moving into recession. Luckily the beginning of another trend was already afoot in sunny Melbourne, where the Crown Casino had been experimenting with bigger buy-ins at the Aussie Millions for a few years. The Crown put two $20,000 events on the 2005 schedule and then held its first $100,000 tournament in 2006. A 10-man “speed poker” tournament that awarded the entire prize pool to its winner, John Juanda, the Million Dollar Challenge was simultaneously an anomaly and a portent of a trend that wouldn’t become fully evident for several more years.
The ensuing years saw the tournament, rebranded as the $100,000 Challenge, become a staple of the Aussie Millions schedule, just as the tournament festival’s popularity was reaching its peak. The field grew from its initial 10 players to 35 by 2011. Well-known pros from the U.S. and Europe made up the majority of the field most years, adding a glamorous international air to the event. Meanwhile the rest of the poker world was beginning to emulate the Aussie innovation by adding high roller tourneys of its own, even if they started significantly below the $100K mark. The Asian Poker Tour and Asia Pacific Poker Tour both turned Macau into the world’s high-roller capital with back-to-back HK$150,000 events in September 2008. The European Poker Tour started with a €25,000 event at its 2009 Grand Final, and the World Poker Tour started adding tourneys with £15,000 and $25,000 buy-ins in 2010.
In 2011 the originators of the high roller trend went a step further. Even though the $100K mark was still considered high for most of the poker world, the Crown Casino added a $250,000 Challenge to the Aussie Millions schedule. Amazingly enough it drew 20 players, good for a $5,000,000 prize pool. Half of that went to poker pro Erik Seidel, who also finished third in the $100,000 Challenge to leave Melbourne with more than $3,000,000 in earnings before the month of January was even complete. By the summertime the WPT was holding a $100,000 Super High Roller tournament of its own – and Seidel won that one, too. In fact, if the high roller trend has a “jump the shark” moment, Seidel’s 2011 was probably it. He finished the year with $6.53 million in total earnings, two-thirds of which came from high roller events that hadn’t existed just a few short years earlier.
Seidel made more for taking on small fields of whales a handful of times in 2011 than he had in the entire first 18 years of his Hall of Fame career combined. In doing so, he wrecked the all-time money list far worse than even the WSOP Main Event had been able to do during its boom years. With all the other marquee players in the world wanting a chance to catch up, the stage was set for the market as we know it today. The next summer’s WSOP saw the world’s first million-dollar buy-in, and this summer will see a repeat of it. The WPT’s new Alpha8 series of tournament all sport $100,000 buy-ins, as do the regular super high roller events on the EPT, and the super high rollers in Macau now pay $250,000 for a seat at the table. And it’s all thanks to high-rolling innovation Down Under.
