If you want to find out who really is the best poker player in the world, don’t look for him (or her) at the World Series of Poker main event. If Jamie Gold is the best poker player in the world, I’ll eat a full deck of 52 playing cards. To find the best poker player in the world, look for the winner of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event.

To win that tournament you need immense skill, and it’s not just because you need to be proficient at five different types of poker. You have to be proficient at five types of poker while also matching wits with the best poker players the world has to offer. This year’s $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tourney started up a few days ago and this is just a taste of the 148-player field: Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Scotty Nguyen, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Phil Ivey, Ted Forrest and 2006 $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament winner Chip Reese. If you can go up against those players, plus a ton more that we didn’t even mention, and walk away with all the chips – you deserve the title as world’s best.

If you talk to any of those players they’ll definitely agree that the H.O.R.S.E. tourney is the best of the best at the WSOP. In fact a number of players want the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tourney to replace the $10,000 No Limit Hold’em tourney as the true WSOP main event. Some people, such as Chip Reese, already consider the H.O.R.S.E. tourney to be the main event. In fact if you look at numbers and level of play, the current H.O.R.S.E. tourney compares with WSOP main events from a decade ago much better than the WSOP main events the last couple of years.

The last man or woman standing in this year’s $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tourney will pocket $2,276,832 of the $7,104,000 prize pool. That’s up from the $1,784,640 that Reese collected last year. Another change this year is that they will actually be playing H.O.R.S.E. at the final table. Last year the final table was played as No Limit Hold’em because the fools that ran the WSOP did not think H.O.R.S.E. would translate very well on TV. They’ve fixed that this year by making the event H.O.R.S.E from start to finish.

Anyone who wants to see the real best of the best that poker has to offer should tune in.

Here are a bunch of other online poker tournaments that you can play!