The three day event attracted 218 entrants (not bad given day one started on Monday night – perhaps this will be addressed in Season 2 and can only be put down to Crown Casino “squeezing” it into their already packed Melbourne Champs schedule) who all paid the AUD$2,700 entry to create a AUD$545,000 prizepool.

After some late nights and long days of play a final table resulted and looked like this:

ANZPT - Melbourne Champion Levick

Seat 1: Heath ‘TassieDevil’ Chick (283,000)

Seat 2: Rodney Burles (168,000)
Seat 3: Sam Khouiss (354,000)
Seat 4: Chris Levick (969,000)
Seat 5: Jie Gao (517,000)
Seat 6: Ben Savage (682,000)
Seat 7: Gregory Shillig (190,000)
Seat 8: Peter Aristidou (432,000)
Seat 9: Kristian Lunardi (713,000)

Some 9 grueling hours later, it was PokerStars.net qualifier Chris Levick that won out over regular and pokernews’ own blogger, Heath ‘TassieDevil’ Chick. Levick took home AUD$158,050 for 1st place and the inugural ANZPT – Melbourne Championship Trophey.

Next on the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour is ANZPT Queenstown. It is a 5 day, NZD$2,500 buy-in event held at Skycity Queenstown from July 21-25. Qualify at PokerStars now and receive $50 free with your first deposit by clicking the banner below:

With just one month to go and 2 weeks of action packed poker, the Melbourne Champs promises to draw the crowds once again to the home of Australasian Poker, Crown Casino.

One exciting new addition to the already packed 2009 schedule is the third leg of the ANZPT (as covered in the article above).

Last year’s Main Event winner James “Jabba” Broom took home a healthy $134,602 in prize money and is sure to be returning to defend his title.

You too could go down in Australasian poker history and with satellites starting from just $2 + 20c at 888 Poker why not start today? If you don’t already have an account at 888, use this link to get 100% Bonus up to $400

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Click here to view the full schedule of tournaments, good luck and see you in Melbourne!

That’s right, PokerStars.net announced earlier this month that the mighty Crown Casino is joing the ANZPT tour by hosting the third leg of the ANZPT on May 25 – 27th, 2009. Crown are adding the crowd drawing event to their already packed Melbourne Champs schedule (info coming soon), running for two weeks in May 2009.

The buy in is AU$2,700 and the field will be capped at 450, that’s a potential prize pool of $AU1.125M.

You can win your buy in, accommodation and spending money through satellites hosted at PokerStars. If you haven’t already got an account at PokerStars, get $50 on your first deposit here.

For more ANZPT information click here

Good Luck!