For the last few years the international Triton High Roller Series has held some of the most prestigious, most talked about high-stakes tournaments in the world and it’s about to get even bigger.
The massive tour announced that online giant partypoker has come on board as the tour’s official sponsor. Partypoker has already invested a considerable amount into the live tournament scene with its revived Millions LIVE flagship tournament and the deal with Triton adds yet another feather to the company’s hat.
The first official partypoker-backed Triton Festival will take place May 5-17 in Montenegro with a record 10 tournaments on tap.
Biggest High-Stakes Series in the World
The Triton High Roller Series has only existed since 2015 but it’s quickly built a reputation as the tour of choice for poker players looking to take part in super high-stakes tournaments.
The tour was founded by Malaysian businessman Richard Yong. Yong was actually one of the most prolific players on the super high roller circuit but evidently wasn’t getting enough action because he decided to start a tour built exclusively for high rollers.
Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Jason Koon, Dan Colman and Makita Badziakouski are just a handful of the big-name poker pros who frequent the tour.
Thus far the Triton High Roller Series has taken place primarily in Asia with events in South Korea, Macau and the Philippines. The tour has also hosted tournaments in Montenegro and Sochi, Russia.
As you might expect, the series features very steep buy-ins scaling all the way up to HK$1 million (roughly $127,000 US). Buy-ins for the series are always in Hong Kong dollars, no matter where the actual event is located.
Last year the Triton released a teaser that claimed the organization would run the biggest buy-in tournament in poker history. That’s no small feat considering the Big One for One Drop, which began in 2012, features a buy-in of $1 million. That means Triton will allegedly run a tournament where the buy-in exceeds $1 million in 2019.
To date the biggest win on the Triton tour took place last summer when Belarusian Mikita Badziakouski won the Jeju Main Event for $5.2 million.
Massive Appetite for High-Stakes Poker
The very fact the Triton Series exists tells you a little about how far the high-stakes poker tournament scene has expanded since the early 2000s.
It used to be that $100,000 buy-in tournaments were essentially a pipe dream but the Aussie Millions, the biggest tournament series in the Southern Hemisphere, started experimenting with $50,000, $100,000 and even $250,000 buy-in tournaments.
Phil Ivey, Erik Seidel and Howard Lederer has significant success playing those events and other tournament organizers started to take notice.
The World Series of Poker added its $50,000 buy-in Poker Players Championship in 2006. The World Poker Tour experimented with its Alpha8 tournament series in the early 2010s and more recently the Super High Roller Bowl by Poker Central introduced a $300,000 tournament.
The super high-stakes trend seemed to culminate in 2012 with the $1-million buy-in Big One for One Drop at the WSOP. The Big One has since taken place three times with players like Antonio Esfandiari, Dan Colman and Justin Bonomo winning $10 million-plus.
Triton may finally eclipse that record-setting buy-in, however, as the company teased the biggest buy-in tournament on record at the start of the year.
partypoker’s Live Tournament Resurgence
Partypoker was the biggest online poker site in the early 2000s but took a significant hit when it voluntarily left the U.S. market in 2006.
The site focused on the global market for the next few years but lost some of the direction that made it one of the biggest online poker companies in the world.
Three years ago, the company set about remaking itself with European Poker Tour founder John Duthie as the new president of partypoker LIVE, the company’s global live tournament tour.
The company also revived its popular Millions LIVE tournaments and has been successfully hosting huge events for the last few years.
Partypoker raised more than a few eyebrows when it managed to successfully host Millions Online late last year, which attracted 4,367 players and created a prize pool of over $21 million. It currently holds the record as the biggest online tournament ever held.
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