Asia Pacific Poker Tour comes to Cebu

CEBU, Philippines - The Asia Pacific Poker Tour Season II champion Van Marcus and several other veteran international poker players are in Cebu for the biggest poker tournament here ever—the APPT-Cebu 2009 at the posh Shangri-La Resort in the Mactan Island until Sunday.

Aside from Marcus, also seeing action are his runnerup in the APPT Manila last year, Tae Jun Noh; Eric Assadorian, winner of the APPT-Auckland; Tony Hackem, runnerup of the NZ Poker Championships; as well as the likes of Bryan Huang, Celina Lin, Daniel Schereiber, and Raymund Wu among others.

This is the Cebuanos’ chance of seeing the poker pros battle against each other.   

APPT president Jeffrey Apas told the media that they are doubling their efforts to bringing the said event to a higher level of awareness and competitiveness for the Asians thus the decision of bringing in the battle to Cebu.

The successful staging of a poker tournament in the Bahamas has inspired APPT to push “poker tourism.”

The event is not only meant to create more interest on the sport here, but also hopes to boost the local economy with the coming of the “poker tourists.”

It was observed that there are many European players seeing action in the event.

Filipino poker enthusiasts are however hoping that a countryman could pull out something this year and become the first from our country to win the event.

Those who can’t afford to pay the P100,000 entry fee, can get free seats as PokerStars is giving away 65 slots to its qualified on-line players.

Poker Stars.net is said to be the world’s largest poker room with over 15 million members worldwide that they have taken a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first and only poker website to reach 160,000 simultaneous players mark.

The five-day tournament here features the P100,000 buy in main event plus the P5 thousand Cebu Cup, P20 thousand No Limit Hold’em and No Limit Hold’em Bounty, P30 thousand No Limit Hold’em six hundred, P40 thousand No limit hold-em turbo, a P50 thosuand Deep Stack tournament and the P10 thosuand rebuy online to the APPT Grand final.

The APPT Cebu action also serves as the grand finals of the Filipino Poker Tour said FPT founder Alan Escaño.  

More to the fun and unexpected twists and turns in this game of skill, there is also a special event dedicated to the victims of typhoons that recently hit the country.

Half of the entry fee of this event goes to charity while the other half for the prize. Whatever amount that is going to be raised from the entry fee, it will be matched by the PokerStars. – THE FREEMAN