Heads-Up Poker Championship

The NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship was won by Erik Seidel who took home $750,000.

Recently the Draw Party for the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship was held at the Pure nightclub inside Caesars Palace at which the match-ups for the event’s first round were drawn.
Sixty four players took part in the first round with some exciting matches taking place. If you enjoy high stake games then one of the first round matches will have been a real treat as 2010’s biggest online winner Dan “Jungleman” Cates played against online poker’s biggest all time winner Phil Ivey.
There were some other great matches in the first round as well. Former WSOP Main Event Champions Peter Eastgate and Chris Ferguson went head to head, as did NBC heads-up veteran Don Cheadle and online poker player Tom “Durrrr” Dwan. Two WPT Borgata champions, Dwyte Pilgrim and Olivier Busquet were against each other and the 2010 CardPlayer Player of the Year Tom Marchese went against Phil Gordon.
This year’s buy-in was raised to $25,000 from $20,000. This means that the head-to-head event had a massive $1.8 million prize pool and an additional $750,000 reserved for first place.
The whole competition took place over one weekend with the field being halved on the Friday. By Sunday there were just eight players left hoping to win the $750,000 first prize. These were Olivier “livb112” Busquet, Jonathan Duhamel, David Oppenheim, Chris Moneymaker, Andrew Robl, David Benhamine, Erik Seidel and Vanessa Selbst.
In the end it was the eight-time WSOP bracelet winner Erik Seidel who was holding the trophy. This win has put him in first place on the all time tournament earnings leader board ahead of Daniel Negreanu with around $14.7 million in career earnings. So far this year Seidel has won three events, been at six different final tables and earned around $4.5 million, and the year has only just begun.
In the end Seidel was facing Chris Moneymaker who had knocked out David Oppenheim and Jonathan Duhamel on his way to the final table. Moneymaker fought hard but Seidel managed to fight him off with astonishing accuracy. Seidel’s win was even more impressive as this is the second consecutive year that he has appeared in the finals, last year he came second to Annie Duke. In the seven years that the tournament has been running only Chris Ferguson has managed the same achievement.