A seat into this year’s World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions (TOC), where some of poker’s most famous WSOP bracelet winners will have the opportunity to compete for a total freeroll prize pool worth $1,000,000, is currently one of poker’s most coveted tickets and according to a recent announcement from the WSOP Academy, one of those seats will now be given to an equally worthy but previously unqualified opponent.

The WSOP Academy, a live poker training company previously known as Camp Hellmuth, was given one of two sponsor-exemptions for this year’s returning TOC, but instead of awarding it to some random Academy participant as they could have, they decided instead to have nine of poker’s most familiar faces compete for it in a winner-take-all sit-n-go style playoff.  The nine players chosen to compete for the TOC seat include Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Andy Bloch, Gus Hansen, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Sorel Mizzi, Liv Boeree, Paul Wasicka, actor Don Cheadle and Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, who can now add this interesting opportunity to a recent rush that has included two 2010 WSOP final tables and a win in the prestigious $50,000 buy-in WSOP Poker Players Championship.
 
The nine player sit-n-go is set to go off this Thursday at noon and will be filmed for use by the WSOP Academy.  The event will be commented on by Phil Hellmuth and PokerRoad’s own Ali Nejad.

The winner of the sit-n-go will join the 20 top vote getters for the WSOP Tournament of Champions on June 27th, along with the three TOC past champions- Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Mike Sexton and Annie Duke- the two current reigning WSOP and WSOP Europe champions- Joe Cada and Barry Shulman- and the one other yet to be determined sponsor-exempted player.

For more information on the WSOP Tournament of Champions visit www.wsop.com.