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What to Watch for at WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown

The 2024 world poker tour seminole hard rock poker showdown kicks off its 13th time as a wpt main tour stop on friday, so here’s a little history lesson about one of the most prolific events in tour history..

After popping in and out of the Port of Miami for WPT Voyage , the World Poker Tour returns to Florida for one of its signature events – the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown in Hollywood, Florida . The history of the WPT at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood dates back over a decade, to Season IX, with the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown debuting in May 2011.

Since becoming a WPT stop back in 2012, the WPT SHRPS has returned each calendar year (except for 2020), making it one of the longest-running active events on the tour today. It’s also been one of the most consistently lucrative stops on tour, with six of the 12 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown champions banking at least $1 million for their respective wins.

The 2024 edition of the WPT SHRPS kicks off Friday, April 19 with Day 1A, followed by Day 1B on Saturday, April 20. The field will combine on Day 2 Sunday, and play through Day 4 on Tuesday until a final table of six has been locked in. The event will be paused at that point, with the final table set to be filmed in late May in Las Vegas.

With so much rich history surrounding this event, it feels only right to reflect ahead of the 13th edition of the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown.

One Year Since Bin Weng Kicked His Career into High Gear

At the outset of the 2024 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, Bin Weng is the No. 1 tournament poker player in the world according to the Global Poker Index rankings. One year ago, Weng was starting to put together a career year with a $1 million win at Borgata and a WSOP Circuit Main Event title over the first few months of 2023.

But that was only the beginning.

Weng flew down to Florida and started logging cashes from Event 1 of the prelims at SHRPS, and by the time the series was over, he’d secure his place at the WPT televised final table. He’d already punched his ticket to the TV tapings in Las Vegas, and then just one week later made his way to Oklahoma to do it all over again. Weng booked another final table spot for WPT Choctaw, and set himself up to play for WPT titles on back-to-back days as he looked to make history .

The first night at HyperX in Las Vegas netted Weng the 2023 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown title and $1,128,250 . And while his second shot at a title came up short in fourth place, Weng was on his way to supercharging the rest of his year.

He went on to win over $2.2 million that July at the WPT EveryOne for One Drop at Wynn Las Vegas, and then capped it all off by chopping the $25,300 High Roller during the WPT World Championship festival. There were a few more players to sweat out, but Weng ultimately locked up 2023 WPT Player of the Year honors as well.

Brian Altman Chasing WPT History at a Friendly Venue

No individual tournament poker player has had more success at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood than Brian Altman. The three-time WPT champion won two WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open titles, in 2015 and 2020 (as well as his third WPT title at the sister property in Tampa in 2021), and also holds the No. 1 spot on the all-time money list for tournaments held on the property.

Altman is the most recent addition to the three-time WPT champions club, and as everyone chases down Darren Elias’ current record of four WPT titles, Altman figures to be a player to watch once the 2024 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown kicks off on Friday.

Checking in on SHRPS 2024 Prelim Action

In the lead-up to every WPT Main Tour Stop at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, a month-long festival of events brings out some of the biggest names in poker and generates tremendous stories (and prizes) along the way.

WPT Champions Club member Chance Kornuth took down a $10,000 Heads Up event earlier this week, defeating Scott Baumstein to seal the deal. Along the way, Kornuth defeated Landon Tice in the semifinals and managed an icy slowroll to his friend on his way to victory .

The biggest story coming out of the prelim events was that of Ryan Hoenig. His run of form started inauspiciously enough with a sixth-place finish in a $600 Omaha Hi-Lo event on April 5. Two days later, it was fifth in an $1,100 No Limit Hold’em tournament. But that’s when the real fun started.

Ryan Hoenig is having the best week ever! Last night, he won the $600 Badugi for his third trophy in three straight nights. The two days before that? He went back-to-back with second-place finishes. In his last five nights, two runner-up and three trophies. Insane heater! pic.twitter.com/lQcykYhcI6 — Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open (@shrpo) April 14, 2024

Hoenig put together back-to-back runner-up finishes on April 9th and 10th, but that was still just the beginning. Hoenig ran off three consecutive victories on the next three nights, from April 11 to April 13 in three different mixed game formats. If he hasn’t used up every ounce of his run-good, Hoenig will be a player to watch for in the Championship Event field.

To the surprise of few who follow tournament results, Ari Engel recorded two titles himself during the SHRPS festival. Two-time 2023 WSOP bracelet winner Brian Yoon picked up a $10,000 No Limit Hold’em title in one of the biggest buy-in events of the festival as well.

WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown Gallery of Champions

Season 9  (2011): Taylor Von Kriegenbergh – $1,122,340

Season 10 (2012): Tommy Vedes – $779,520

Season 11 (2013) : Kevin Eyster – $660,395

Season 12 (2014): Eric Afriat – $1,081,184

Season 13 (2015):  Griffin Paul – $1,000,000

Season 14 (2016):  Justin Young – $669,161

Season 15 (2017):  Tony Sinishtaj – $661,283

Season 16 (2018) : Scott Margereson – $696,740

Season 17 (2019):  James Carroll – $715,175

Season 18 (2021): Brek Schutten – $1,261,085

Season 20 (2022): Mark Davis – $1,000,300

Season 21 (2023):  Bin Weng – $1,128,250

Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood All-Time Money List

According to Hendon Mob, as of April 18, 2024

• *Brian Altman – $3,171,258
• *Alex Foxen – $2,974,564
• Sean Winter – $2,742,404
• Daniel Colman – $ 2,510,966
• Jason Mercier – $2,495,977
• Justin Bonomo – $2,480,463
• Blair Hinkle – $2,314,241
• Jake Schindler – $2,161,055
• Mukul Pahuja -$2,096,376
• Joseph McKeehen – $2,076,236

*WPT Champions Club member

For full tournament details, check out the 2024 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown landing page .

Related News

Here are the final six players left to battle for the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open title and the $839,300 first-place prize.

Dylan Linde is the last remaining member of the WPT Champions Club in the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown field, and with $8 million in career earning and success at a variety of different tournament stakes, he'll be a tough out on Day 4.

Faraz Jaka has garnered significant responses with hand history quizzes on social media, and he took advantage of his run during the 2024 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown to generate discussion around several key hands he played along the way.

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Texas Tech Now

Newly hired rawls college leader founded the world poker tour.

April 19, 2024

Steve Lipscomb will use his expertise to expand the Alderson & Griffin Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship as its executive director.

Steve Lipscomb wants his students at Texas Tech University 's Jerry S. Rawls College of Business to understand it's not often a business comes together according to plan. 

He knows success stories like that can seem unrealistic, but from his experience creating the World Poker Tour (WPT) in the early 2000s, it can happen – and fast. 

“The first three to five years played exactly as I had pitched to our investors,” Lipscomb recalled. “I told them we were going to make this into a televised sport and people were going to flock to it.”

Lipscomb remembers it was like riding a wave as he juggled the titles of CEO, promoter, writer, producer and director, determined to transform poker into a televised mainstream sport. As he gained his balance and began to enjoy the view, he became a huge believer in the art of doing – an endurance race he still enjoys today. 

Lipscomb will not only practice this work ethic, but also will strive to “create and iterate” as the newly hired executive director for the Alderson & Griffin Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship . The center provides innovative networking opportunities, insightful educational forums and discussions, relevant academic programs and applied research to a wide range of entrepreneurs including emerging leaders, successors, senior generations, students and key nonfamily executives.

“The center is an important addition to the fertile ground we are seeding at Rawls and Texas Tech to encourage students, faculty and our community to help us build the futures we all desire,” said Rawls College Dean Margaret L. Williams . “We are excited to have Mr. Lipscomb join our exceptional faculty as an associate practice professor and look forward to benefiting from his years of experience building, advising and shaping successful public and private ventures.”

The Alderson & Griffin Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship is strategically positioned at the intersection of corporate enterprise, entrepreneurial innovation and academic research. Lipscomb is “all in” to further elevate its collective creation, progress and understanding.

“I think nobody knows what you're capable of more than you do,” he said. “The center will be a place where people can discover what that means for them.”

Taking a Gamble

In Lipscomb's case, the more he was told the WPT would never work, the more he knew it would. 

There was a time when The New Yorker magazine even weighed in on the WPT phenomenon with a cartoon that jokingly questioned why poker was featured on the Travel Channel. Lipscomb shares in the same bewilderment about his own life path, having earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence from University of Chicago Law School with the intent to become a lawyer. 

While he enjoyed law school and thrived there, the Tennessee native found himself equally intrigued by the classes and performances he participated in at The Second City, a comedy club/theater and school of improvisation in Chicago. Post graduation, he moved to Los Angeles and quickly realized his law firm work was just a way to support his entertainment habit. 

“It was pretty clear in my mind that I was headed do some sort of crazy showbiz stuff,” he said. 

His first film venture was a documentary chronicling changes in the Southern Baptist Convention and its impact on women pastors. The film performed well at festivals, won numerous awards and garnered the attention of Hollywood producers and screenwriters like Al Burton and Norman Lear. 

That opened the door for Lipscomb to begin producing television with them and others. While on hiatus from producing a show for Comedy Central, Lipscomb had the opportunity to produce and direct a one-hour documentary about poker to air on the Discovery Channel. He accepted and quickly became intrigued about the poker world. 

“I witnessed this remarkable, but very small community of people playing poker for a living,” Lipscomb said. “When that one-hour documentary aired, it doubled its audience in an hour with no promotion. Very clearly, there was an audience who wanted to watch poker.”

Lipscomb pitched “poker as a sport” to every network he could find focused on sports or reality programming but was turned down flat. 

“They thought I was nuts,” he recalled, “which turned out to be the best “bad beat” of my life. When they said ‘no,' I quickly managed to raise money and launched the World Poker Tour as the first poker sports league on the planet.”

At first, it was a challenge for Lipscomb to figure out how to make a card game appear exciting and digestible to viewers who are not poker aficionados. He described this trial-and-error process as a post-production tangled mess that took eight months to unravel. 

The solution involved 16 cameras with angles that showed the cards not too little or too much, paired with custom-built graphics that popped out when players looked at their cards and disappeared when they folded. This enabled viewers to comprehend the game even while on mute or in a bar.  

“We did testing in Las Vegas that helped the network understand people were not just interested in fluffy pieces about casinos,” Lipscomb explained. “They wanted to watch the poker.”

Sure enough, once the WPT began airing in 2003, all doubts about Lipscomb's creation were crushed by numbers. Almost immediately on the Travel Channel, they had a household rating of 1.5-2% – comparable to National Basketball Association games at the time. 

Publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Inc. Magazine featured Lipscomb and his WPT success story on their front pages and covers as the show continued to skyrocket in popularity. 

Just one year later, Lipscomb and his executive team looked up in awe at the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square after ringing the bell to take WPT Enterprises, Inc. public. From that point forward, he progressively removed many of his early WPT hats, one by one, to focus on the company's growth as its president and CEO.

“The world changed and I sort of found what I would call ‘my jam,' which was the excitement of building something from nothing and scaling every vertical we could find,” he said, “from consumer products to electronic video games and other categories.”

No Bluff Business

Looking back, Lipscomb considers the WPT as his business school of sorts as he worked to transform a television show into a global sports/gaming brand.

“We had an incredible team that didn't say ‘no' a lot,” he credited. “We found ways to say ‘yes' to build things that worked, and when they didn't work, we got better and better at moving on quickly.”

He and his teammates created award-winning consumer products, marketing partnerships and brand-building verticals; while, at the same time, seeding and launching numerous businesses, including the world's first poker talent management company, the first televised card tour in China's history and a popular mobile phone game. 

By 2009, Lipscomb was approached by multiple companies interested in purchasing the WPT. After carefully analyzing the hand in front of them, he and the board decided it was time to cash in those chips. 

“The acquirer was an online gaming group in the market segment that was making most of the money at the time,” he said. “I was not interested in staying onboard, so I walked off into the sunset to find the next thing.”

After his WPT chapter closed, Lipscomb felt empowered by the business knowledge he absorbed from the experience. He remained CEO of the publicly traded shell company and merged it to expand an existing energy company, quadrupling the stock price. He then became CEO of the spinoff company to oversee a private placement memorandum and the monetization of leftover WPT assets, which produced more than $25 million for the new company to deploy in the domestic oil and gas industry.

“Once I handed off management of the two spinoff public companies, I blissfully worked myself out of a job,” he said. “I planned to spend the rest of my time trying to help people build stuff to make the world a better place.”

Lipscomb formed Practicrats, LLC to chase this passion by working with corporations, sports leagues and foundations to build businesses. He is founder/board chair of Gamers.Vote which partners with gamers, influencers and companies to encourage voter participation, as well as GamersAct.org, inspiring gamers to address climate change. He also spent a decade as managing director of FixItAmerica.org which supported bi-partisan resolutions in state legislatures. 

As part of those initiatives, he attended the EarthX conference in Dallas last year where a government official inspired him and other private enterprises to aim toward a more sustainable future. 

“I walked away from there thinking I needed to find a way to do more,” he admitted.

A few conversations later, he learned about the job posting for the Alderson & Griffin Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship and felt what he describes as a “Star Wars” tractor beam drawing him to the position. 

He is convinced the work being done at Texas Tech can change the world, and this belief only strengthened after his visit to campus. 

“The sort of visionary people like Dean Williams and the leadership at Texas Tech pulled me in,” he said. “I think we have lofty goals, and I say ‘we' because I feel like nothing gets done by an individual. It's always done with people, so to join that community and find a way to try to help it grow and flourish is exciting to me.”

Lipscomb officially began his Rawls College role April 11. He plans to teach one class a semester beginning in the fall, but the Alderson & Griffin Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship activities will begin immediately and include the ongoing McCoy Family Business Speaker Series .  

“There are great minds here and great things happening,” he said. “I think there's never been a better time, with all of the resources around us, for people to join together and do amazing things. That's what this opportunity means to me.”

Lipscomb laughs as he discloses he would have never imagined jumping up and down to participate in a business school program a year ago. But he says that is the beauty of his remarkably blessed and wonderful journey. 

“I find in life it's always better to pick a path and start walking,” he shared. “If you had told me when I made my first social issue documentary about religious faith that I was going to be the poker guy, I would have told you that was crazy. But that's the way life works, I think. 

“And I certainly encourage everyone around me to do the same. So, if you have something in you that just won't be quiet – something you feel like you need to build – please come and join us.”

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Astros crush Rockies in Mexico City Series opener

Yordan Alvarez homered twice and finished with three hits, Kyle Tucker hit also went deep and the Houston Astros beat the Colorado Rockies 12-4 in the first game of the Mexico City Series on Saturday night.

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Yainer Diaz had three hits and Tucker, Mauricio Dubon and Jose Abreu each finished with two hits in the win. Ronel Blanco (3-0) allowed two runs on five hits and two walks, striking out eight, in 5 2/3 innings for Houston, which snapped a five-game skid.

Ryan McMahon homered and Nolan Jones had two hits for Colorado.

The Rockies opened the scoring in the bottom of the first inning on McMahon's fourth homer of the season — a 459-foot, two-run shot.

Houston cut the lead in half in the second on an RBI double by Trey Cabbage and took the lead in the third. Alvarez hit a two-run homer off Rockies starter Cal Quantrill and Tucker followed with his sixth of the season to make it 4-2.

Houston extended its lead in the sixth and chased Quantrill. Tucker singled, Jeremy Pena walked and Diaz singled to load the bases with no outs.

Jalen Beeks replaced Quantrill and gave up an RBI single to Dubon, and Pena scored on a double play.

Quantrill (0-3) allowed six runs on six hits and two walks in five-plus innings. He struck out two.

The Rockies appeared to cut the deficit to a run in the fifth when Brenton Doyle came home on a single, but he failed to touch the base rounding third and was out on a force.

Colorado loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the sixth but reliever Seth Martinez struck out Ezequiel Tovar to end the inning.

The Astros tacked on two more runs in the eighth. Diaz singled and Pena scored on an error by right fielder Hunter Goodman. Abreu hit an RBI single, and the

Astros blew it open in the ninth.

Alvarez led off with his seventh home run of the season, Dubon drove in another run with a double and Abreu and Chas McCormick had RBI singles. The Rockies got two back in the bottom of the inning when Charlie Blackmon drove in Doyle with a single and scored on Elehuris Montero's single.

—Field Level Media