The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure

PokerStars Caribbean Adventure For most of the year, the Atlantis Resort and Casino is home to some of the world's elite travelers and gamblers. You can see beautiful women in bikinis sipping expensive cocktails, obscenely expensive yachts floating in the marina from every highly-polished window, golfers delight in the wind off the ocean. Even celebrities grace the sands here -- walking about without their entourage. Poker is the last thing on anyone's mind.

This changes once a year here in the sandy paradise of the Bahamas. For the past several years in fact, the environment has changed every January. Hundreds of people flock from all over the world to compete for millions of dollars in prize money while soaking up the kind of sun you just don't find elsewhere in January. In just a few weeks, the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure will invade and depart Paradise Island. If you're a veteran of poker and poker tourneys, you already know how much fun these events can be, even when they're located in some stuffy East coast hotel casino complex. Now imagine yourself sitting on a winning pair in the paradise of the Caribbean.

PokerStars Caribbean Adventure - European Poker Tour

Its the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, and it is an $8,000 buy-in poker tournament event that is part of the European Poker Tour (EPT) which takes place annually in The Bahamas. As it is sponsored by PokerStars, members of that site have extra opportunities to play in. This event used to be part of the World Poker Tour. More on that later. The 2008 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure was held at the Atlantis Resort and Casino on January 5-10, 2008, with Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier taking home 2 million dollars American. Grospellier, of Team PokerStars Pro, is definitely a player who has grown from both the online and offline poker communities. He's graduated from the online tables, where he flew to as close to Superstar status as you can online in the blink of an eye, and is now a superstar in the bricks and mortar tourney world. Hopefully, we will see more from this player, who will be looking to improve on his two best finishes -- this win at the PCA, and a second place in Copenhagen in season two. A win at the PCA, like a win no where else on the European tour, can seal one's place as one of the brightest players on the poker circuit.

The story of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure is a story of the maturating and fine aging of a poker tournament. It was cute in the PCA's infancy -- a little tournament on a cruise ship at sea in the Caribbean -- lots of buzz and shallow media reporting. The PCA was impressive in its young adulthood -- in the World Poker Tour days. Now, as a top European Poker Tour event, the PCA has become one of the biggest high stakes tournaments in the world.

PCA Event at the Atlantis Grand Ballroom

When this year's PCA event began, over 1100 players filled the Atlantis Grand Ballroom, host of the 2008 event. It took two days to fit everyone in and five days to cull the field to the top eight players. -- and what a final eight they were. From unknown online prodigies to seasoned live tournament veterans, the PCA final table was a place where real poker would go down, and real money would go to a solid player. With a $2 million first prize on the line, there was little doubt about how serious the day would be.

Now in the planning stages for its sixth year, the PCA (as it is known in the poker world) seems to have survived the recent shake up in poker tournaments, a shake up which ended the lives of many individual tournaments and some entire poker tourney series. Just think of what happened to the Professional Poker Tour.

PCA Participating Players

This event always attracts many of the world's greatest players, including Team PokerStars Pro members Daniel Negreanu, Joe Hachem, Chris Moneymaker, Victor Ramdin, Vanessa Rousso and many more. As for the tourney's switch from the World Poker Tour to the European -- perhaps it is over concerns about legislation in America that has kept players from entering certain WPT events, and most likely sank the very promising Professional Poker Tour.

The PCA holds a special place in the hearts of many tournament poker players, especially because the location is so desirable and because there are so many online qualifiers and younger amateur players. The pros love this because it lightens the competition, and the rest of us like it because we might have a shot at winning a few hands. The atmosphere is reportedly quite friendly, as there is a large presence from PokerStars, the sponsoring site and the site which provided the most routes into the tournament. These players may know each other, may even have played fairly high stakes games with one another in the recent past. While this is not unique to the PCA, it stands out because of PokerStars heavy presence.

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