After 16 days of non-stop poker action, the Playground Poker Spring Classic has come to a close. From April 25th through May 10th, poker players from around the world gathered at Playground Poker Club in Kahnawake, just outside of Montreal, to play the game they love and compete for huge prizes!
The first event in this year’s Spring Classic was the first of three partypoker LIVE events – the $200 + $20 Grand Prix Canada. With a total of 28 starting Day 1s that began on February 12th on partypoker, this $500,000 Guaranteed event managed to attract a massive 2,570 entries! The Grand Prix Canada Champion was Cassidy Battikha, who took home $84,050.00 for his efforts in the tournament.
With the Grand Prix Canada completed, the other side events in the Spring Classic got underway, including 5 events with $220 to $330 buy-ins in several formats: PLO, Bounty, Survivor, and 5-Card PLO. These events were as popular as always, and even with the relatively small buy-ins, they paid out a total of almost half a million dollars in total prizes.
A last-minute addition to the Spring Classic schedule this year was the partypoker LIVE High Roller event, a $10,000 + $300 NL Hold’em re-entry tourney. The event saw 53 entries for a $514,000 prize pool and was won by Mike McDonald, who took home a cool $200,000 for his win.
The cornerstone event of the Spring Classic was the $5,000 + $300 partypoker Million North America, with its massive $5,000,000 guaranteed prize pool. There were those who thought that it would be impossible to meet such an ambitious guarantee, but with a total of 932 buy-ins and 236 Phase 1 entries, the tournament ended up generating a Canadian record prize pool of over $5.7M! At the end there was just one player left with over 1 Billion tournament chips – Jean-Pascal Savard, who earned a prize of $956,000.00.
Visit the Spring Classic Live Event Blog to see all of the results and reporting from all of the events.
All in all, with over $7,000,000 in prizes distributed across 10 events, the 2017 edition of the Playground Poker Spring Classic has set the new high-water mark in Canadian poker history. Next on the agenda is the 2nd World Cup of Cards, coming to Playground Poker Club in August-September 2017.
