World Open IV comes to town

The PartyPoker.com World Open IV takes place in London between 25th April – 2nd May 2008 and will feature a top class field led by ‘Ambassador of Poker’ Mike Sexton. PartyBets.com is offering odds on the event and make recent Irish Open winner Neil Channing the 16/1 favourite. Sexton is available at 28/1.

A PartyBets.com spokesman said: “There was no choice but to make Neil Channing favourite to win considering his form but he does have a strong heat featuring his pal Mick McCool. 16/1 may be far too short a price to back for the man they used to call ‘Bad Beat’ but now “One Out” but we’ve been getting stung on these markets and are taking aversive action!

“Mike Sexton is a fantastic addition to the World Open line-up but he features in a heat that also includes Barny Boatman, Marc Goodwin, Jan Peter Jachtmann and Juha Helppi so he will have his work cut out.”

Other familiar faces to look out for this year include recent PartyPoker.com European Open IV winner Nick Slade, Theo Jorgensen, Ian Frazer, Ross Boatman, Marty Smyth, Roberto Romanello, Jon Kalmar, Jon Magill, Thomas Bihl, Roy Brindley, Surinder Sunar, John Tabatabai, Pippa Flanders and Liam Flood.

The Matchroom Sport organised event will be broadcast on Channel 5 in the UK later this year and distributed internationally. The 72 runner $8,000 buy-in event features a first prize of $250,000 from a total prize pool of $576,000.

Last year, 45-year-old former Sidcup betting shop owner Anthony Hardy triumphed over a final table that also featured Ian Cox, Ram Vaswani, David Rudling, Ian Frazer and eventual runner-up Ian Woodley. The winner in 2006 was Pippa Flanders while in 2005 Lee Nelson won the inaugural event.

The winner of each of the 12 heats will progress to the semi-final stage, and, for the first time in the event’s history all is not lost for the runners-up on the table as they will battle it out for the remaining two semi-final spots in “last chance” turbo heats.