PokerStars International Poker Tours

The return of the NAPT for a second season and numerous new poker tours were announced by PokerStars at the end of the PCA last week.

PokerStars made a number of recent announcements relating to their line-up of international poker tours. The announcement which caused the greatest excitement was about season two of the North American Poker Tour. Daniel Negreanu from Team PokerStars pro told the media and industry representatives that the NAPT will be returning to the Bicycle Casino between March 5 – 10th and then to the Mohegan Sun between April 8 – 13th.
These two stops of the NAPT will feature the popular Bounty Shootout events and they will both be filmed for broadcast on ESPN in the US. Kelly O’Hara the Vice President of marketing at the Bicycle Casino said that they are expecting over 1,000 players to take part in the event and that the casino is running a festival from the 23rd until March 4th featuring satellites and other events around the main event.

The second season of the NAPT is due to be shown on many international television stations, ESPN in the US, TSN in Canada, Channel 4 in the UK and many other countries in the commonwealth and Latin America.
There was also an announcement about the fourth season of the Latin American Poker Tour. The season is due to start in Sao Paolo, Brazil from February 16 – 20th. They have also added a new stop to this year’s tour in Colombia. During last year’s season Jose Barbero, a Team PokerStars pro won back to back main events which stirred up real interest in the Latin markets. This year they are hoping that the opening event will be the biggest poker tournament in Latin American history with over 500 players taking part.

An announcement was made about the six events due to take place at the PokeStars Macau poker room at the Grand Lisboa hotel and Casino in China. One of these events will be an Asia Pacific Poker Tour main event. The third season of the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour was also announced with destinations including Darwin, Australia and Queenstown, New Zealand.
Finally there was a progress report on the Italian Poker Tour given by Team PokerStars pro Luca Pagano. Pagano said that there was a stop in Nova Gorica in which lots of locals, Romanians and Croatians took place. This is why PokerStars introduced the new Eureka Poker Tour which will take place across some European and Balkan countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Croatia.