The 2010 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship has announced its lineup.  The tournament will take place March 4th through the 7th at CaesersPalace.    This is the third year of a four year deal NBC signed with Caesers to host the event.  The origin of the program has a murky history.  Some have suggested it was inspired by the World Heads-Up Poker Championship others say NBC was looking for poker programming and saw an opportunity to televise heads up matches.  Others suggest NBC was only looking for poker programming because of the NHL lockout of 2005 left big empty gaps on the sports schedule which a tournament like this could fill.

The tournament is No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em.  The players are arranged in a bracket akin to the March Madness brackets with players randomly seeded 1 through 16 in four different sub-brackets.  Players that win two matches and reach the third round win 25k.  Players that get to the Quarter-finals 75k, Semi-finals 125k, the loser of the finals wins 250k with the winner taking home 500k.

This year there will be seven online qualifiers as well as 57 pros that were selected to the field.  NBC has all the qualifiers here.  The inclusion of certain names are a bit of head-scratcher as they got in by reputation only, while others got in for being a bit of a celebrity draw.  There were certainly a lot of omissions but as we learned last year when Shannon Shorr didn’t get an invite this is a made for television event and NBC doesn’t seem particularly interested in getting the best 64 poker players in the world, the best 64 heads up poker players in the world, rather they want a compelling an entertaining product.

Their underdogs or Cinderellas will come in the form of celebrity poker dabblers like Jennifer Tilly, Gabe Kaplan, Orel Hershiser, Don Cheadle and Kara Scott (arguably Annie Duke too) and their online qualifiers.  Don’t expect the qualifiers to get much camera time if any unless they make a deep run.  Winning a match or two won’t turn Joe Blow into the Gonzaga, Bucknell or University of Richmond of tournament poker, in fact, you probably won’t even hear about it.

The rest of the field include the big wigs at one of the big American sites; Howard Lederer, Phil Gordon (is he still a poker player?), Andy Bloch, Erik Seidel, Chris Ferguson, and sponosred pros (co-owners?) like Mike Matusow, Erick Lindgren, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, and Gavin Smith.  You could argue that half those players are very deserving of their invitations and a couple are getting in only because of who they are in the industry, who they used to be as players, and for nothing else.

Once again there is an ample helping of World Series of Poker Main Event Champions and deep finishers.  There may be some confusion to the general public but Dennis Phillips and Darvin Moon despite having massive chip stacks didn’t win their Main Events.  Jaime Gold and Greg Raymer did hang onto their huge chip leads and win the bracelet and are deserved invitees but Phillips and Moon not really.  An enticing first round match up with be Moon vs. Joe Cada who like Joe Hachem, Jerry Yang, Chris Moneymaker, Peter Eastgate got invitations too.

Robert Varkoyni never got his invite in yet another reason he won his Main Event one year too early.  Other Main Event champions include the aforementioned Chris Ferguson, Huck Seed, Johnny Chan, and Doyle Brunson with Seed and Ferguson having already won this event.  Apparently, Steve Danneman’s 15 minutes of fame is up as he didn’t get an invite but other second place finishers like Paul Wasicka  (who also has won this event), Sam Farha and David Williams did.   

The remainder of the field include Eric Baldwin, Allen Cunningham, Pieter de Korver, Eli Elezra, Antonio Esfandiari, Ted Forrest, Barry Greenstein, Bertrand Grospellier, Gus hansen, Jennifer Harman, Jesper Hougaard, John Juanda, J.P. Kelly, Phil Laak, Jason Mercier, Dario Minieri, Greg Mueller, Daniel Negreanu, Scotty “Can I get a cocktail” Nguyen, Annette Obrestad, Brock Parker, Vanessa Rousoo, Mike Sexton, and Leo Wolpert.