There is a long tradition of $300,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bowl in May. This was usually a warm-up tournament for the World Series of Poker that would begin afterward. However, this time it will be held on December 17-19. Poker Central made an announcement where they stated that the date had been changed. The tournament will have a 48-player cap and it is a rake-free event that has a prize pool of about $14.4 million. $5 million will be reserved for the winner of the event together with a Super High Roller Bowl ring for champions. The date change is supposed to be permanent, which means that the future tournaments will be held by the end of the year as well. It will be included in the point race for the High Roller of the Year which is usually decided once the year ends. The players that want to participate in the tournament will have to make a deposit of at least $30,000 by November 26. However, only 25 spots will be rewarded and there will be a lottery system which will select the lucky players. This system will be streamed live on November 27. Furthermore, 18 seats will be reserved for the ARIA VIP guests. Finally, five places in the tournament will be an award for the top five players in the High Roller of the Year leaderboard at that moment. This leaderboard takes into account the whole season and Poker Central is the body responsible for governing it.
Leader
Sam Soverel is the leader with 1,220 points. He is closely followed by Cary Katz who has 1,205 points. The third place is occupied by Justin Bonomo with 1025 points, and the fourth by Dan Smith who also has the same amount but his other statistics are slightly worse than those of Bonomo. Other names that appear on this top 10 list are David Peters, Nick Petrangelo, Jake Schindler, Ben Yu, Isaac Haxton, and Elio Fox. The Vice President of Content for Poker Central, Sam Simmons, stated that the Super High Roller Bowl had become one of the most exclusive poker championships in the world and that it was the “pinnacle of the High Roller Triple Crown.” He added that they were happy to celebrate the milestone that they would achieve in December, along with the additional changes which would continue the success of the event for many years in the future. PokerGO will stream the whole 2018 SHRB and NBC Sports Network will broadcast a set of episodes related to this event on NBCSports.com and their dedicated app for NBC sports. The first tournament was held back in 2015 and it has a price tag of $500,000. The first event was won by Brian Rast who managed to cash out $7,525,000. The buy-in was lowered the following year to $300,000.