Elite Tampa Bay Poker League members compete at Win! Derby, for a coveted seat at the WSOP Championship Event. (Image: Elite Tampa Bay Poker League website)

The start of the 2024 World Series of Poker is about a month away, but players have been preparing for its pinnacle event ever since the close of last year’s WSOP. 

The $10,000 WSOP Championship Event (also known as the “Main Event”) will be contested between July 3-17, and some will be bringing their $10K to the poker table with a dream. For some in the Florida area, they will have the dream, but a club that they are a member of has already taken care of the $10,000 part of the equation.

Long-Running League Provides Competition and Enjoyment

The Elite Tampa Bay Poker League has been a part of the scene on the Gulf Coast of Florida since “about 2014, maybe 2015,” according to the league manager, Mark Winchell.

On a Thursday evening at Win! Derby (the former Derby Lane) in St. Petersburg, Florida, the ETBPL was meeting for the seventeenth week of their twenty-week 2024 Spring season. At stake? According to the recorder of the statistics for the group, Andra Zachow, the league generates money that the players win to take them to the WSOP Championship Event.

It is a pretty easy process for the league. 

Players who are interested in competing in one of the two twenty-week seasons (there is one in the spring and one in the fall) put up a $300 entry fee that pays the administrative fees for the league and builds an initial kitty for the league to give at least one $10,000 seat to the WSOP. 

From there, players must enter at least seventeen of the twenty weeks of the season to be eligible for a seat.

These twenty tournaments are a $200 buy-in event (with an optional rebuy, should you be eliminated), with $100 going to the WSOP seats, $80 to that evening’s prize pool, and $20 to Win! Derby.

In each of the twenty tournaments, the players not only compete for the prize pool but also for critical points towards earning one of the $10,000 buy-ins to the WSOP. 

Detailed insights on the current WSOP odds highlight how these points affect tournament strategies. The final table is where the points are awarded, with ten points going to the winner, nine to second, and so on.

At the end of the twenty weeks, those who have played the requisite number of tournaments – and have been extremely skilled in working their way to the top of the standings – walk away with the laurels.

“This year has been a great one for us,” Zachow mentioned before the Week 17 tournament began. 

“Between the Fall Season schedule and this one, we’re going to give away sixteen seats, it looks like. Many of the players who already won their $10K seat in the Fall Season have decided to not play in the Spring Season, but there’s still a great deal of competition for those who are here.”

There to Have Fun, But Also to Win

On this Thursday night, Win! Derby was hopping. Recently, in the state of Florida, dog racing was discontinued, but those sites where the activity took place were able to maintain their poker rooms that were added in the Aughts. 

These poker rooms were also allowed to start dealing table games such as Three Card Poker, Blackjack, and Ultimate Texas Hold’em per the April 2021 compact that the Seminole Indian Tribe of Florida reached with Governor Ron DeSantis.

Although you could look across the still well-manicured grounds of the dog track, you could see that all remnants of that activity had been removed from the area. Instead, the attention was all on the Win! Derby gaming floor, where eighteen table games and roughly thirty poker tables were in action.

The ETBPL combatants slowly worked their way into Win! Derby, with an initial hardcore fifteen players starting off the event at 7 PM (or thereabouts). Other members of the crew would show up, including the originator of the league, Dave Bennett (the group was originally his friends who gathered at his home), and “The Godfather” of the ETBPL, Steve Trizis, who allegedly goes back the furthest as a competitor in the league. 

That does not mean that there isn’t a high level of competition between these players. Everyone likes to walk away from the felt a winner (including Zachow; there were three women in the event), and the added incentive of playing for a WSOP Main Event seat made the players bring their ‘A’ game. 

It was quite a thing to see – a friendly game of poker, with nobody taking it too seriously, but still wanting to win.

So, who won on this night in St. Pete? Who will win the seats to the 2024 WSOP Championship Event? If you want to know, you can visit the league’s website, tampabaypoker.com, where the current standings (and who is still eligible in the race) are presented. 

If you are in the Tampa/St. Pete area and you are a poker player, it may be worth your time to get in the game with the Elite Tampa Bay Poker League – you might just find yourself at the 2025 WSOP Championship Event in the end!