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World Poker Championship

Officially, there is no such event as World Poker Championship to determine, who is the World Poker Champion. There are, however, several other well known worldwide poker tournaments held annually, which give us a pretty good picture of who is the best poker player in the world - The World Poker Champion. Before we start giving titles, lets explain a few things.

Giving the title of The World Poker Champion is actually quite difficult task and this is also the main reason why there is no official World Poker Championship. Just like chess, poker is considered a sport by many, but unlike chess or any other sports for that matter, winning a poker tournament with thousands of participants requires a far greater amount of luck and not so much skill. In fact the element of luck alone is the reason why lots of amateur poker players have won big championship events taking home millions of dollars.

Live World Poker Championship

As we have said before - there are several worldwide poker tournaments that replace the official World Poker Championship such as Word Series of Poker and Word Poker Tour, which makes our task even more difficult. Some say Word Series of Poker is the unofficial World Championship of Poker, which is unfair and most importantly - untrue. Why should we grant a title of World Poker Champion of the year to a person winning one tournament and not to the winner of the other? Of course we could expect a person to win all the worldwide events throughout the year, but that would make no sense as winning two or more major events in a row is extremely difficult due to luck needed to win even one tournament. In fact we are yet to see a player who wins more than one global poker tournament during the same year.

Not only do we have multiple big poker tournaments, we also have several poker games. The term "poker" is much broader than you might think. There are many different poker games - Texas Holdem, Omaha, 7-Card Stud, Badugi, Razz just to name a few. Most popular of these is of course Texas Holdem, but even for that game alone there are countless variations - No Limit Texas Holdem, Limit Texas Holdem, Pot Limit Texas Holdem, Heads-Up No Limit Texas Holdem, Live Short-Handed Limit Texas Holdem ... the list is endless.

Taking all the above mentioned things into consideration, it is rather difficult to announce who is The World Poker Champion for any given year. In fact anyone of us can become famous as an unofficial poker champion by winning one of the major poker tournaments held annually. You would not be the first one whose life would turn around after winning a major tournament and taking home millions of dollars as prize money. It is quite common to see relatively new poker players reach the final table, who will then take some poker lessons before the finals are played out. Many of these players become professional poker players sponsored by various online poker rooms after the event.

A prime example of an amateur winning Word Series of Poker are Peter Eastgate, the 2008 World Series of Poker Championship Event winner and Chris Moneymaker, who made his way to the tournament by playing at one of the $39 poker satellite tournaments at the PokerStars online poker room. Believe it or not, Chris Moneymaker took home $2.5 million the day he won the event - not a bad investment, was it? To make a long story short, he was offered a sponsorship by the Pokerstars, he quit his job and became a professional poker player and spokesman for WSOP. Chris Moneymaker wasn't a very skillful player in 2003, when his life was changed after winning the World Series of Poker. It was his first live tournament and he managed to win it merely because the luck was on his side. There is no doubt, that there were a lot more talented players at the event and even though Chris Moneymaker is far from being a World Poker Champion skill wise, we can definitely call him a poker celebrity and the new player of the year 2003.

Online World Poker Championship

Playing poker online requires a completely different set of skills because in online poker it is far more difficult to guess whether your opponent is bluffing or not. In online poker you can use some advanced tools and calculators to make it up for not being able to read your opponents. Just like analyzing other players at the table in live poker, using a good poker software gives you a considerable edge over the players who don't. A great tool to use at online tournaments is Tournament Indicator.

Currently there are several online poker rooms that host annual poker championship events. The biggest of these is being held at PokerStars with $40 million in 2009 prizepool. The second biggest is being held at FullTilt with $19 million. Surprisingly, the most generous online event is held at UltimateBet. For the third time not enough players have signed up for the tournament with a guaranteed prizepool of $2.5 million and each time UltimateBet has had to pay out more money than they have made selling the tickets to the tournament.

Besides these 3 major poker rooms that host online championship events, there are numerous other poker rooms that offer free or low buy-in tournament qualifiers (satellite tournaments) to the live poker championship events. One of the best places to get your tickets from is CarbonPoker.