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Would you dig a flashy gold bracelet this year? Then
check out Bluff’s guide to bluffing your way into
the WSOP. Here are the top seven ways to sneak through
the back door… without paying the $10,000 entry.
As any fool will tell you, the best way to win a seat
at the World Series is to enter Bluff’s Fantasy
Poker Challenge (see pg. 88 ), where you can pick up
a seat GRATIS! All you have to do is pick the best fantasy
poker team and blam - you will be teleported to Vegas
for a shot at Poker’s ultimate challenge. Sounds
easy? Well it is, but you’ll need to know your
Ivey from your Hellmuth to get that free trip to Vegas
during the most important week on the tournament calendar.
Of course, if you want to do it the hard way, then
it’s satellite tournament time. This can be a
gruelling ordeal if you’re not dating lady luck,
and you’ll need to learn the finer points of satellite
play to stand a chance. Satellite Strategy (Championship
Series) by Tom McEvoy & Brad Daugherty is the definitive
book on the subject and might be a smart investment.
For those hoping to earn their seat sweating it out
in cyber land, as did the last two World Champs, you
have more opportunities than ever this year. With more
online poker sites than you shake your mouse at populating
the cyber strip, you could pretty much find a WSOP satellite
qualifier any day of the week. Even better, they’re
all hoping to earn the kudos afforded to PokerStars.com
for their extraordinary Raymer/Moneymaker coup, and
so their packages are generous bouquets of air fare,
hotels, spending money, promo gear and, last but not
least, seats. Buy-ins differ and tournament structures
vary widely of course, so surf around until you find
the tournament tailor-made for you. Otherwise, take
the scatter-gun approach and play them all!
For traditional types, you need to get yourself down
to Harrah’s circuit tournaments for some hotly
contested live action. You can enter their super-satellites
for just $200 which is a great deal when you look at
the buy-in/number of players ratio. If your strength
lies in terrestrial play, this is the path to follow,
as these card room satellites won’t pit you against
the sheer masses that you’ll encounter online.
But be warned, every Tom, Dick and Harry that plays
at Harrah’s every single night will be gunning
for the same seat as you.
Harrah’s also have an instant win website at
http://clients.eprize.net/harrahs/wsop/. It’s
a kind of poker themed electronic scratch card and it’s
free to play. We’ve been trying like mad, but
no joy as of yet. If you win a seat this way, you’re
probably lucky enough to go on and fluke the whole World
Series.
There are plenty of other land-based satellite tournaments
at casinos up and down both coasts, and east and west
of the Mississippi (and some right on the old Mississippi).
Some of the big bar tournaments are offering the ultimate
poker prize to their top dog, and, with it being illegal
in most cases for them to charge you a buy-in, a bar
tournament isn’t such a bad way to enter. The
good news about a tourney in a bar is that if you bust
out early, well…you’ll be in a bar, and
that’s never a bad place to be.
Chipleaders.com, the online poker community and social
network, is, we hear, giving away five seats to members,
simply for registering. It may be the lazy-man’s
way of bluffing your way to the WSOP, but every Homer
Simpson knows that its never a bad feeling to win something
without trying. Yeah sure… winning with effort
is noble, but once you get to Vegas, you’ll have
plenty of opportunity to put in the effort.
Finally, and this may sound a bit crazy at first, why
not organize a mammoth home game tournament? It’s
actually not as difficult as it sounds. At $200 a pop,
you would need fifty people to drum up the $10,000 WSOP
buy-in. Poker forums like chipleaders.com and side-pot.com
will help you find people in your area looking for action.
The bottom line is this: everybody in the business
of poker knows how much everybody in the business of
playing poker wants to go to the WSOP. Casinos and just
about everyone else who wants you as a customer are
happy to pay your $10,000 ticket to ride, just to get
more bodies through the door. That means that players
in 2005 have oceans of opportunity to win a seat in
what has become the ultimate poker competition - bar
none. Whether you try one of our seven suggested routes
to landing you butt in a seat at the Rio, or you come
up with your own, Bluff wishes you good luck on the
bracelet trail.
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