GPS Birmingham Latest, Negreanu Tops 2014’s List of Spenders

GPS Starts Second Session in Birmingham

After a day of action on the opening leg of this year’s Genting Poker Series, a total of 13 players made it through to Day 2. Taking place online and featuring 50 hopefuls, Day 1A’s virtual surroundings provided the perfect protection from the UK’s storms and gave a handful of fortunate grinders a chance to take to the felt in Birmingham on Saturday.

With Day 1A in the books, the £440 Main Event’s second starting flight got underway earlier today inside Genting Club’s Star City Casino and at the time of writing 205 players had already taken to the felt.

Aside from Julian Thew working to defend his tournament title, a number of other familiar faces from the UK circuit have been on display and on a mission to scoop the lion’s share of the £125,000 prizepool.

Indeed, among those currently thriving on Day 1B are Simon Deadman, Paul Jackson, Sunny Chattha and Simon Trumper.

At the time of writing the day’s 146 entrants had been whittled down to 134 and for live updates you can check out Genting Poker’s blog here.

Daniel Negreanu is the Year’s Biggest Spender

We may have only just rung in the New Year but already some of the world’s top poker players have been reaching deep into their pockets to play some of the most expensive tournaments in the world.

Thanks to a number of High Rollers and Super High Rollers taking place since the start of January, the likes of Philipp Gruissem, Igor Kurganov, Daniel Negreanu and Mike McDonald have all be busy at the felt in 2014.

Indeed, thanks to a recent article by PokerOlymp we’re able to see exactly how active the games top tournament players have been so far this year. Using all the data available to them, the German site managed to list not only the winnings of each high roller but their outlay their total profit.

So far the biggest losers of 2014 are Gruissem and Kurganov with 631,750 in tournament buy-ins. In contrast, Phil Ivey is the biggest high roller winner of the year and an overall profit of €2,398,050.

That haul takes into account Ivey’s €229,950 outlay as well as €2,628,000 prize money and puts him ahead of Mike McDonald (€1,761,346) and Fabian Quoss (€1,252,846) in the yearly rankings.

Also listed on the profit chart is Daniel Negreanu. Despite going rebuy crazy in the latest Super High Roller in Australia, Daniel is still in 14th place on the leaderboard with an overall haul worth €141,450. However, that figure could certainly have been a lot higher if it wasn’t for his high roller spending reaching a jaw dropping €1,041,150.

Top Ranking High Rollers for 2014

1              Phil Ivey – € 2,398,050

2              Mike McDonald – € 1,761,346

3              Fabian Quoss – € 1,252,846

4              Yevgeniy Timoshenko – € 1,084,050

5              Isaac Haxton – € 1,056,740

6              Dan Shak – € 593,792

7              Vanessa Selbst – € 484,249

8              Erik Seidel – € 476,982

9              Douglas Polk – € 269,370

10           Matt Glantz – € 253,266