PokerStars Festival Bucharest will take place between 31 July and 6 August at the Marriott Hotel. The event is organized by PokerStars, the largest online poker room in the world and PokerFest Romania, the Romanian poker tournament operator.
The Romanian live poker arena is in trembling this month because one of the “heavyweights” of the global live tournament circuit is preparing to enter the stage with a new major international poker festival in Bucharest.
It will be an intense poker week with many tournaments and cash games that will have a Main Event in the center with an exceptional guarantee: 500.000 euros. The main tournament will have a buy in of 1,100 euros and the new champion of the series will go home with more than 100,000 euros. So we have ahead an event that will dominate the year 2017 in live Romanian poker.
Together with PokerStars Championship, the PokerStars Festival is one of the two new brands launched by PokerStars at the end of the 2016 season, replacing the former European and global poker gloried, European Poker Tour and Eureka.
The festival at the end of July has a tradition in Romania: last year in May, a very successful stage of Eureka Poker Tour took place in the capital. At the time, the main tournament gathered 578 players and the champion, Israeli Avishai Shitrit, won 107.350 euros besides the trophy.
This year participation is expected to be at least as massive, with players from over 20 countries booking airline tickets for Bucharest as the series is promoted globally, and online satellites playing daily on PokerStars already have participants from all the continents.
If last year PokerStars celebrated the event with the participation of a celebrity star loved by all Romanians, Daniel Negreanu, this year the room invites a real symbol of modern poker: Chris Moneymaker.
Even though the American decreased the pace of the game in recent years, his name will forever remain in the poker history book due to the epochal victory he recorded in 2003 when he won the World Series of Poker Main Event and 3.5 million dollars after qualifying for the most important live tournament in the world playing a $ 82 satellite on PokerStars online. This victory was not the most massive, but it still bears the biggest symbolic load: Moneymaker has managed to dethrone the live veterans from Las Vegas and bring to the world stage the online poker.
After him, the world of poker has been forever conquered by the young players on the internet who have taken the strategy of playing to a higher league. Global poker has seen a popular explosion, and, in a symbolic way, the Bucharest festival owes its existence to Chris Moneymaker, the player with a destined name. He will therefore play poker in the capital of Romania, against and with his Romanian fans, starting July 31st .
On the occasion of this event, PokerFest CEO, Sorin Constantinescu said: “First of all, we welcome the launch of the two new brands of PokerStars Live events – PokerStars Festivals and PokerStars Championships – and we are determined to engage with all our enthusiasm in consolidating their image and success in Romania.
Secondly, we are honored by the return of the great live poker show in Bucharest, another sign for us that the festival we organized together in May 2016 has risen to the required rigor and international standards imposed by PokerStars.
These quality criteria are what brought us together as organizers.
PokerFest will consider the tournament series in early August as another milestone in our relationship with the world’s most active poker promoter, and, as always we are sure that we will be successful”.
