The World Poker Tour is about to get wild and chaotic, to the benefit of poker fans everywhere.
The WPT announced the creation of WPT Wildcard, ” a new poker brand and format designed for poker players and fans, geared towards social media content, creator participation, and non-traditional gameplay that brings unexpected twists to the felt.
Built with streaming, short-form content, and community engagement in mind, WPT Wildcard introduces a fresh entertainment-first layer to poker,” according to a press release.
“WPT Wildcard offers a regularly occurring slate of unpredictable gameplay environments designed for content creators and their communities,” said WPT CEO Adam Pliska. “This revolutionary series breaks the mold of traditional poker, blending competition and entertainment in ways fans will never expect.”
The WPT will launch this brand at the WPT Prime Lodge series in Austin next month with two unique events.
The first will be called Heart Attack Poker, which takes place Oct. 8. It’s will be a live-streamed cash game filled with WPT Ambassadors and content creators who will be strapped to heart rate monitors.
This isn’t a new concept. ESPN’s show “sport’s Science” wired up players for one of its segment, and the MANSIONPoker.net Poker Dome Challenge series in 2006 hooked monitors and displayed the player’s heart rates to viewers.
It was fun to see then, and will be fun to see in October.
Chaos to rein
And then on Oct.12, a $300 event open to anyone called the Mystery Bounty Wildcard Chaos will be held. This one is going to be wild because of its “unconventional gameplay elements such as power-ups and penalties that could make or break a player’s chances at victory.”
The Lodge has spread this sort of event a few times before, but this is the first time WPT’s name is attached.
The chaos comes in the form of penalties and power-ups that players receive whenever they earn a bounty with a knock-out. They also can win a cash prize ranging between $500 and $5,000.
The power-ups range from swapping tables and running the board twice, to respawning with an average stack after being knocked-out, never posting a small blind again, or even teleporting to the final table.
Penalties that players could un-luck into include devastating ones like “stack swap,” which requires the player to trade stacks with the shortest stack in play, forfeiting all bounties, not being able to raise during one orbit, and losing half their chips. Here’s all of them:
The Lodges Instagram page shows players getting chaotic in an event held in May.
WPT Wildcard events will expand beyond Austin, with additional tournaments planned at future WPT stops worldwide.
