$400 Deep Stack NLH (Re-Entry) $100,000 Guaranteed | Structure Level 5: 200/400 with a 400 ante Day 1A Entries: 148
Carlos Bermudez
The first flight of the series is cruising up towards 150 with plenty of time to push the count higher. Registration is open until the start of Day 2 on Sunday at 11 am so we’re going to blast the $100,000 guarantee.
We found a few folks in the field who already own some Hollywood hardware. The previously mentioned Jeff Silverstein won a DSPS trophy last year and Carlos Bermudez is the defending champ in this event.
Min Zhang is looking for his first DSPS title but she has three major Hollywood titles and she finished runner-up in the $25K High Roller a few weeks ago.
$400 Deep Stack NLH (Re-Entry) $100,000 Guaranteed | Structure Level 4: 200/300 with a 300 ante Day 1A Entries: 116
Jeff Silverstein
It’s a comfy afternoon in the Poker Room with a bunch of regulars and friends sitting around the tables trying to spin up a big stack for Day 2 and some big money.
A few friends in early action include Jeff Silverstein, Rafael Lima, Scott Levitt, 2022 Deepest Stack champ Joe Bartholdi, Josh Cranfill, Lyle Diamond, Paul Domb, Thomas Gari, Richard Whitebrook, and Scott Zakheim.
$400 Deep Stack NLH (Re-Entry) $100,000 Guaranteed | Structure Level 3: 100/200 with a 200 ante Day 1A Entries: 105
The first break of the first tournament of the series is here with a very healthy 105 entries here after three levels. That’s an easy pace to surpass the $100,000 guarantee before we get too deep into the weekend.
Cards are in the air for Flight A of Deep Stack Poker Series Event 1, kicking off a fun two-week run of tournaments with deep, long structures and a lot of money up for grabs.
While players get settled for the day, we will pick up some coverage at the first break.
The next new series on our schedule this year is the May Deep Stack Poker Series, a series with eight trophy events and $730,000 in guaranteed prize money. The $400 buy-in opening event has a $100,000 guarantee and three starting flights.
Players start with 30K in their stacks and all Day 1 levels last 40 minutes, going up to 60 minutes at the start of Day 2 and 90 in Level 27. Late registration and unlimited re-entries are available until the start of Day 2 on Sunday at 11 am.
Flight A will play through 14 levels and survivors will return on Sunday.
$100,000 Guaranteed Prize Pool
Players begin with 30,000 in chips
Levels 1-14 last 40 minutes; Level 15-26 last 60 minutes
2024 May Big Slick $100K Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, Florida $1,100 Big Slick No-Limit Hold’em (Re-Entry) Starting Stack: 30,000 Levels: 30 & 40 Min
Prize Pool: $158,110 Players: 163
Flight A: 92 Entries; 12 Advanced Flight B: 71 Entries; 9 Advanced Day 2: Sunday May 5 @ 12PM
Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood Poker celebrated a milestone with the 2024 Poker Showdown. It was the 50th major series we hosted, starting with the Poker Showdown in 2011, and includes the four major series each year plus that one time the WSOP Circuit came to town.
We put tournaments in ballrooms and Event Centers and set up final tables in the massive original Hard Rock Live arena and the cozier Paradise Theater. We even had arena seating for a few years.
Have a look at the raw numbers and wrap your head around them –
Over a decade of huge events, more than 500,000 entries came through the door, and we paid out more than $500 million in prize money.
We’ve seen things, memorable things, and a lot of happy moments.
Here’s a look at some of our favorites.
2013 SHRPO Championship – $11,920,000 Prize Pool
We have to start with the tournament that put us on the map.
In 2013, Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood Poker announced we were running a $5,300 buy-in event with a $10 million guaranteed prize pool. The poker world was different back then, and many people were a little shocked at our audacity or shrugged it off as a gimmick. But they also showed up in South Florida in mass to create a huge prize pool worth $11,920,000.
Blair Hinkle outlasted the 2,384-entry field to take the top prize of $1,745,245, still the record for the biggest single payout in our history.
Blair Hinkle, 2013 SHRPO champBrian Altman, 2015 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open Champion
Brian Altman Wins it Twice
It’s not easy to win a WPT title, and it’s really not easy to win the same WPT title twice. It’s so tough that it’s only been done once and happened right here.
Brian Altman won the 2015 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open Championship, topping the 1,027-entry field for $723,008 and his first WPT title.
“This is my first time here. I was very impressed with the venue, the staff, the dealers, and this beautiful casino,” Altman said after that win. “I was really impressed. It’s nice to check out new casinos with nice facilities.”
Five years later, Altman was back in position at the 2020 LHPO Championship final table and made WPT history by winning the same event for a second time.
In addition to those two titles, Altman won five other Hollywood titles, including a $25K High Roller and a $1,100 Big 4 event.
Brian Altman, 2020 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open Champion
Wins Stacked on Wins
With seven major Hollywood trophies, Altman sits in our top ten for all-time wins with some serious company.
Leading that list, as he has for many years, is our local legend, Raminder Singh. He’s been a model of consistency and success almost as far back as we’ve been tracking results. Singh won three titles in 2015 (two during that year’s RRPO series) and his fourth in 2018.
Since then, Singh has captured at least one new trophy every calendar year from 2018 to the present, and that streak continued with his 12th in the recent Poker Showdown.
Michael Newman is always in the neighborhood trying to catch Singh and picked up his 11th to stay one behind in second place with Yuval Bronshtein, David Shmuel and Matt Bretzfield in the top five. They are followed by more great players and a string of some of the best non-Hold’em players in the game.
Top 10 all-time wins:
Raminder Singh – 12 wins Michael Newman – 11 wins Yuval Bronshtein – 10 wins David Shmuel – 9 wins Matt Bretzfield – 9 wins John Holley – 8 wins Brian Altman – 7 wins David Prociak – 7 wins Gabriel Ramos – 7 wins Phil Hui – 7 wins
Reaching further down the wins list, we have an incredible 33 players who have won at least four major titles and another 45 sitting one back at three wins.
Setting Records; Breaking Records
We’ve come a long way since the first event of the first series when we drew 1,000 entries for the opener in 2011.
The fields were trending up consistently until we went really big during the 2016 Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open. We added two flights, changed the guarantee from $500,000 to $1 million, and then created the biggest tournament field in Florida state history.
Event 1 of that series drew a record crowd of 5,018 entries, and we continued to grow to the point where that field isn’t even in the top five anymore.
We topped that record by more than a thousand in 2021 and, in 2022, set the bar so high we might never catch it again (but it will be fun trying). The opening event of the 2022 SHRPO had an incredible 7,703 entries on the opening weekend, and the count snowballed each day.
That’s a lot of people in one game and it was a great time.
Come see us if you want to play in huge multi-flight, top-money tournaments.
Starting with Taylor von Kriegenbergh as our first WPT Champ in 2011 up to reigning LHPO winner Raminder Singh, we’ve had some first-rate players take the title in our headliner each series. We’ve had WSOP bracelet winners, multiple WPT champs, high rollers, and local grinders take the top spot. All worthy of the champion title.
Of the half-billion dollars in prize money we’ve paid out, more than $195 million was earned in our Championship/Main Events. We noted Blair Hinkle has the biggest Championship payout in our history, but we’ve had ten players bank $1 million or more with the win.
The complete Champions list is too long to fit here, so we have a running list at the link below.
All the money stats are fun and amazing and something to see, but we are nothing without our amazing, loyal players.
We love seeing our local poker room regulars sitting beside old and new friends from around the world. It’s hard to fathom that we had players walk up to the registration desk more than 500,000 times, even more when you include satellites and secondary events.
Thank you to all the players who turned out for the first 50 series and made them memorable; we look forward to what we see over the next 50.
