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World Poker Tour -WPT- Season Three: Ultimate Bet in Aruba
Published: 2004-10-01
 World Poker Tour -WPT- Season Three: Ultimate Bet in Aruba; ``UltimateBet.com Poker Classic'' Brings Poker to the Tropics: 647 Players Buy-in for $4 Million Total Prize Money
Business Wire, Oct 1, 2004
ARUBA -- Despite Hurricane Jeanne, Hundreds Still Make It to Aruba for Tourney
Braving the fury of Hurricane Jeanne, hundreds of intrepid poker players made it to Aruba for the UltimateBet.com Poker Classic, the fifth stop on the acclaimed WORLD POKER TOUR. 647 players either won their entry online through a satellite or bought-in for $6,000, and tournament sponsor UltimateBet.com anted up an extra $118,000 to make the total prize pool a cool $4 million. That pot is $2,256,000 larger than last year's tournament, which drew 436 players. The winner of the UltimateBet.com Poker Classic will take home $1 million, double what last year's victor claimed, and then advance to the WPT Championship when the tour's season culminates at Bellagio in April 2005. The WORLD POKER TOUR is the highest rated series in the history of the Travel Channel, airing Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
The WORLD POKER TOUR continues to average a "poker millionaire a month" in its 16-tournament season. In Season Three the total prize money has already reached $15,194,470, a $6,631,590 increase over Season Two Tour stops to date. The high stakes action is attracting increasing numbers of players vying for the prize money and fans eager to witness the minting of a millionaire at the Final Table. Projected to reach a total of $70 million, Season Three's prize pool is rising with every stop on the Tour.
Adding to the excitement, UltimateBet.com staged a pre-tournament "Celebrity Aruba Home Game" featuring Ben Affleck and a number of top professional WPT poker players, including Annie Duke, Phil Hellmuth, David "Devilfish" Ulliott, and Antonio Esfandiari. Each star hosted a table, and 15 lucky winners walked away with sets of WPT-embossed poker chips in sleek wood cases. Affleck also played in the main WPT event, but was eliminated on the first day.
The tropical destination has not only attracted celebrities, but also players from a host of countries including Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, China, the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, England, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S. Unique among WPT events, the tournament format makes the most of the soft tropical breezes and warm Caribbean sun; the Final Table will be played outside amongst a backdrop of ocean and palm trees.
The next and sixth stop of the WORLD POKER TOUR'S 16-tournament season is the Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship, from October 19-22 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. For the complete tournament schedule and casino contacts, please visit www.worldpokertour.com.
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Poker tourist plans to retire after shock $1.7m win in Vegas
Published: 2005-05-04
 Poker tourist plans to retire after shock $1.7m win in Vegas
By Ian Herbert, North of England Correspondent
04 May 2005
After 25 years running a company that makes drying equipment for the pharmaceutical industry, Paul Maxfield reckoned he had earned two weeks of fun on the Las Vegas poker tables. But returning home with the largest sum ever netted by any Briton in a poker game in the United States had not formed part of his calculations.
Mr Maxfield was back in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, yesterday $1.7m (£900,000) richer, after clinching the second place spot in the week-long World Poker Tour (WPT) Championship.
So meagre were his expectations of success that he had to cancel return flights home twice, as his participation in the competition was prolonged.
Mr Maxfield, 48, who employs 25 people at the company he established in 1980 with his brother-in-law, Steve Elliot, has always had an eye for the gaming tables.
He started out at age 17 playing for pennies and graduated to a local casino where winnings were £100 tops. Amid the daily grind of producing flatbed dryers and granulation suites, internet competitions have yielded the odd big win. And there have been a couple of good events; among them, a £60,000 payout in the European Poker Tour in Paris last year.
Mr Maxfield, who has two children and is divorced, paid out £1,000 for the cachet of playing in the all-night qualifying competition for the WPT event and surprised himself by earning the right to compete with 450 others in the competition itself.
A place in the last 100 (guaranteed winnings £30,000) was certainly not expected and prompted the second cancelled flight.
As Mr Elliot looked on, Mr Maxfield found the opposition whittled down to five, and eventually one - the talented Vietnamese-American player Tuan Le, with whom he contested a dramatic eight-hour final.
"It was like the Ryder Cup," said Mr Maxfield, as he described the final at the luxurious Bellagio Hotel, which was watched by a huge television audience in the US. "All the audience [was] shouting for the American and there were only about eight English people shouting for me." Mr Maxfield's family, who shared his slim expectations of success, was reduced to text-messaging him from Staffordshire.
The game lasted nearly three times longer than a typical WPT final but Mr Maxfield was blessed with a sequence of good cards, including the five and six of diamonds in his last hand, and in the words of one of the sport's analysts, Mr Le was "on the ropes" for a considerable time.
But the American, who had already won one WPT competition this season, eventually revealed the vital seven that he needed in his last card and clinched the $2.8m first prize.
Mr Maxfield's success adds to the reputation in the US of British poker players, whose audiences in the UK have been limited to competitions screened by Channel 4 and Sky Sports. Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott, a former stand-up comic, bricklayer and lorry driver from Hull, has had an extraordinary five-year record on the US poker tables and was watched by 1.7 million British insomniacs when he won a competition on Channel 4 in 1999. But his biggest purse, $589,000, for seeing off a field of 160 players in the Jack Binion World Poker Open at Tunica, Mississippi, last year, pales in comparison with Mr Maxfield's haul.
Mr Maxfield has decided that his winnings will buy a "Mercedes, not a Ferrari" and said that he is looking forward to leaving the pharmaceutical industry. "I'm going to pay off my mortgage and retire - which isn't bad for 48," he said.
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