Beginning this Sunday and continuing for the next five Sundays, NBC will be airing the 2009 National Heads-Up Poker Challenge, starting at noon each week. The event was recorded last month at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and features a field of 64 players, including some of the best tournament and heads-up players in the world.
The field included many of the usual suspects, such as Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, Daniel Negreanu, Scotty Nguyen, Doyle Brunson, Tom Dwan, and Mike Matusow. Perhaps the player with the toughest road, though, would be one of the finalists, Vanessa Rousso. On her way to facing eventual champion Huck Seed in the finals, she squared off against the likes of Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, Paul Wasicka, Daniel Negreanu, and “ElkY” Bertrand Grospellier.
This Sunday’s episode will feature some of the interesting match-ups from the Spades and Clubs brackets. Some of these pairings include Chris Moneymaker facing off against Daniel Negreanu, Annie Duke vs. former Everybody Loves Raymond star Brad Garrett, Phil Hellmuth vs. Mike Sexton, the Vanessa Rousso, Doyle Brunson match, and Scotty Nguyen vs. Hevad Khan.
Sunday will be a great day for watching poker on television as several other poker events will be televised on a few different networks. Of course GSN continues its airing of High Stakes Poker and over on the Fox Sports Network, they will be showing the World Poker Tour. But nothing quite compares to the heads-up, match-play style that is the National Heads-Up Poker Challenge.