Caesars Palace to Host Next 4 years National Heads-Up Poker Championship

NBC announced an agreement has been reached this past week making Caesars Palace the exclusive home to the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship for the next four years. The Caesars Palace Poker Tournament Room has played host to the tournament for three (2006 - 2008) out of the event's four year history. With this agreement, they will continue to do so through 2012.

NBC's National Heads-Up Poker Championship is one of the most widely-watched of all poker programming on television. The show, which usually airs on NBC during consecutive Sundays in April and May, has garnered strong viewers numbers, and has seen a consistent rise in ratings since its inception.

The National Heads-Up Poker Championship features 64 poker players competing in a series of heads-up (one-on-one games of No Limit Texas Hold'em) matches to determine the best heads-up poker player in the world. This tournament has a unique, single-elimination, bracket-style format modeled after college basketball's championship tournament, except that the finals are the best of three.

The event showcases the skills of many of the world's best players, along with a few poker-playing celebrities, who must win 6 heads-up matches in a row in order to claim the prestigious and coveted title. Past winners in this event are Phil Hellmuth (2005), Ted Forrest (2006), Paul Wasicka (2007), and Chris Ferguson (2008), who have 21 World Series of Poker bracelets between them and combined career tournament winnings in excess of $28 million.

"Caesars Palace is world famous for their poker room, so there is no better place in Las Vegas for us to hold the National Heads-Up Poker Championship," offered Jon Miller, executive vice president of NBC Sports. "In the past three years our affiliation with Caesars Palace has helped produce great participants, great on-site attendance and strong television viewership. We're looking forward to more of the same over the next four years."

Other participants reads like a who's who of poker: Chad Brown, Johnny Chan, Allen Cunningham, Antonio Esfandiari, Sam Farha, Jamie Gold, Joe Hachem, Gus Hansen, Phil Laak, Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu, Greg Raymer and Gavin Smith. Model and television personality Leeann Tweeden served as host in 2008, taking over for Shana Hiatt.

"Caesars Palace is proud to be the home of such a popular tournament- among both poker players and fans- for four more years," said Caesars Palace president Gary Selesner. "Our hotel and casino guests get quite a thrill out of being able to see so many of poker's top pros all in the same place at the same time."

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