Celebrities and Poker Pros to Battle for Expected £4 Million Prize Pool at PokerStars.com EPT London Poker Festival

LONDON, September 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

The PokerStars.com European Poker Tour (EPT), Europe's richest and most popular poker tour is coming to London this month. In its' eight year history, almost 40,000 players have hit the felt, and the EPT has paid out over £200 million in prize money. In August this year, the EPT Barcelona event broke all previous records and became the largest live poker event ever held in Spain with 811 players taking their seats to play for share of the £3.5 million prize pool. The EPT London is set to continue this record-breaking trend with the prize pool expected to exceed £4 million.  

Celebrities such as ex-tennis star and professional poker player Boris Becker, model, presenter and previous EPT title winner Liv Boeree, and well known broadcaster, journalist and 2006 EPT London winner Vicky Coren will sit down alongside the biggest names in poker, all eager to pick up the title and first prize, which is set to hit the £1 million mark for the first time ever.

 The 7-day long poker festival presented by PokerStars.com, will offer players some of the best quality tournament poker action in the world. There are 31 events on offer, including the European 8-Game Championship, the No Limit Hold'em Women's Event, the two-day long £20,000 buy-in High Roller tournament and of course, the coveted EPT London Main Event.

This year also marks the first ever EPT London Quest, an exciting competition run through Twitter where one lucky player will win a seat in an EPT London side-event tournament.  Poker fans will need to follow the account @PokerStars and hashtag #EPTQuest from 8.30am on Sunday 2^nd October for clues for a password and details of a secret central London location. Once they crack the code and turn up to the location, they will need to correctly say the password then play and win a 5-minute heads-up tournament. Win the tournament, and they will receive one of nine golden chips to enter a live game against the other eight winners. The champion of this table will take their seat at the "No Limit Turbo - Win the Button!" tournament at 8.00pm the same day.

Last year the record-breaking PokerStars.com European Poker Tour Main Event was the biggest poker tournament ever held in the UK, attracting 848 players. It made David Vamplew the highest-earning Scottish poker player ever with an amazing £900,000 first prize.

The PokerStars.com EPT runs from September 30 - October 6, 2011 at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel in central London. A full schedule of the events is available here: EPT Schedule

A hi-res photograph of Team PokerStars Pro Liv Boeree can be found at: http://wtrns.fr/aLePPoGQbBe0Ic

Please credit all insertions with the following: © ZoeMcConnel / JoshBaskin.com

About PokerStars:

PokerStars operates PokerStars.com, the world's most popular online poker site, and serves the world's largest poker community, with more than 47 million registered members. It's the first choice of the world's top players, with more daily tournaments than anywhere else, and with the best security online. More hands have been dealt on PokerStars.com than any other site; that's over 67 billion hands and more than 430 million tournaments played.

PokerStars.com operates worldwide under license from the Isle of Man government. Recent additions to the PokerStars family include PokerStars.fr, which operates in France under the French government license, as well as PokerStars.it, which operates in Italy under the Italian government license, and PokerStars.ee, which operates in Estonia under the Estonian government license.

PokerStars.com stages some of the biggest online poker tournaments in the world, including the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) and the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), and is the official sponsor of some of the biggest live poker tournaments in the world, including the European Poker Tour (EPT), the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) and the UK & Ireland Poker Tour (UKIPT).

PokerStars.com is also home to a team of sponsored players known as Team PokerStars Pro. This elite group of players travel the world competing in international tournaments.

More information can be found at: http://www.europeanpokertour.com/ or contact Charley Grafton-Chuck on +44(0)2070 332 660 cgrafton-chuck@uk.peppercom.com