Bracelet for the Big One

The Big One, a $1m poker tournament scheduled for next year’s WSOP, was given a boost this week when WSOP officials announced the super-duper-mega-high-roller will meet official bracelet criteria.

With 22 players, including Daniel Negreanu, Tom Dwan and Johnny Chan, reportedly ready to gamble, the Big One has met the minimum field needed for bracelet events, but is still a long way short of smashing the 2006 Main Event record prizepool of $82,512,162.

The Big One has courted controversy since being announced at this summer’s series, with pros like Vanessa Selbst claiming poker’s high-roller events are ‘getting out of hand’. But with $111,111 being given away by each player to Guy Laliberte’s One Drop charity, helping dish out clean drinking water to the world’s underprivileged, it’s not all that bad.

Amazingly, some French poker sites have even begun running satellites into the Big One, although there’s still no sign of poker’s major sites putting up the $1m buy-in. If you’re interested in direct buy-ins, you can reserve your seat for ‘just’ $50,000, with full payment due by May 21.

It all starts on July 1 2012, and as always PokerPlayer will bring you the biggest news. If we’re not playing in it that is…