SOURCE: Las Vegas Sun

The main event at the World Series of Poker and the annual World Poker Tour Championship, two of the most anticipated and celebrated events in the game, rate as the world's richest regularly scheduled poker tournaments.

Right behind those behemoths, nestled at No. 3, comes the World Poker Tour Doyle Brunson Classic, which concluded Tuesday night at the Bellagio.

This year's Brunson Classic, won by Eugene Katchalov of New York, attracted a field of 664 players for a prize pool exceeding $9.6 million and a first-place payout of better than $2.48 million.

The 664 entrants surpassed the 583 last year's tournament drew, a field of 555 in 2005 and a field of 376 in 2004.

"And that was without Internet involvement," said Doug Dalton, director of poker operations at the Bellagio, referring to last year's government crackdown on online gambling, which has put a damper on the Internet poker scene.

There has never been a direct, sanctioned link between U.S. Internet poker players and land-based tournaments such as the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker. Especially before the government's online gambling legislation, however, major Internet poker sites helped beef up the fields of those events through "satellites," or qualifying tournaments.

Of the 555 players who competed in 2005, about 40 percent were Internet qualifiers, according to an estimate by Jack McClelland, the Bellagio's tournament director.

Of this year's field, at least one-third qualified through "super satellites," qualifying tournaments with an entry fee of $1,640 held at the Bellagio, McClelland said. The Brunson Classic carries a $15,400 entry.

"Since the loss of the Internet, poker's been kind of slipping a little bit," McClelland said.

"A lot of tournaments have been getting a little smaller. We've seen other tournaments dropping to 400 players instead of 500, 300 instead of 400."

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