There's another entrant in the mid-priced poker series, with the new PokerAtlas Tour making its debut at Texas Card House Houston over the weekend. Robyn Berry, of the Houston suburb of Kingwood, Texas, etched her name into PokerAtlas Tour history by winning the first-ever tour event.
PokerAtlas has sponsored individual poker tournaments in the past, but announced the launch of its new tour in April. The company, founded by WSOP bracelet winner Jon Friedberg and most noted for its tournament software and its online cardroom database, kicked things up another notch with the launch of the tour for 2023.
PokerAtlas also signed prominent tournament director Justin Hammer as its Executive Tour Director, and the pair brought the tour's debut series to one of Houston's largest and newest rooms, TCH Houston. Thursday brought the start of the first official PokerAtlas Tour event, a $300 buy-in no-limit hold'em event with a $50,000 guarantee.
That guarantee was never in doubt. When registration closed, 411 entrants had built a prize pool over $102,000, more than double the posted number. At Friday's final table, Berry started on the short stack but then rolled to the win, earning a career-best $21,690 payday.
PokerAtlas also launches 'Playback' chip-count visualization
PokerAtlas also unfurled a new technological treat, the PokerAtlas Playback. The software extra takes all the chip counts through the tournament and creates a visualization of an event from start to finish. Here, the software app takes all the chip counts from the entirety of Event #1 from TCH Houston, which can be used to create a brief video, as PokerAtlas showed on Twitter:
The TableCaptain System mentioned in the PokerAtlas Tweet is how the data gets entered. When a player busts, the dealer at that table marks the player as busted in the software, which is running on a tablet at each table. Chip counts at all tables are entered by the dealers on breaks. In the late stages, such as at a final table, chip counts can be updated more frequently by another observer. All the data, gathered throughout the tourney, can be compiled as shown in the video, which ends with Berry's tab being the only one showing and possessing all the chips.
Featured image source: TCH Houston
