Bodog Mini Series Sends First Player To WSOP 2010

Slightly overshadowed by this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event, another major poker event was taking place that would award one big winner a seat in next year’s WSOP Main Event. The site was Bodog Poker and the event running concurrently with the 2009 WSOP was the Bodog Mini Poker Series (aka the Bodog Mini Series).

It ran from July 3 to 15, consisted of 13 poker tournaments (each of which had the same buy-in of $10 + $1), and ended with John Ormsby (aka Getn_Outa_MI) winning one of the first seats (if not the first seat) into the 2010 WSOP main event to be awarded anywhere by an online poker room. Bodog boasted being the room that accomplished that last year, for the 2009 WSOP main event, as well.

Players earned seats in the July 21 Semifinals Tournament either by placing high enough in one of the 13 Bodog Mini Series events or by being one of the Top 10 on the Leaderboard running throughout the series (to earn points and be included on the Leaderboard, players had to come in the top 30% of whatever tournament they entered). Of those players, 82 made it to the July 23 Finals. Winner Ormsby, 25, says he’s been playing poker online for 4 years and, with this $12,000 prize package win hopes to get in on some of the side tournaments ahead of the 2010 WSOP main event.

The second place and third place winners of the Bodog Mini Poker Series Main Event, incidentally, win free entry into Octobers, Bodog Open IV (more on that in a future post).