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High Stakes rooms are few and far between on the Las Vegas Strip. "The Big Game" started at Sam's Town many moons ago. From there, it moved to the Horseshoe and then to The Four Queens. Fast forward to the last decade and to Bobby's Room at the centre of the Bellagio poker room. It now hosts the nosebleed $4K - $8K game.

Aria casino located in Las Vegas' newly built City Center hosted a special freeroll tournament Saturday to mark the opening of their own "High Stakes" poker room. Bobby's Room was named after Bobby Baldwin and in the same style Aria wanted to name their room after a prominent poker pro. No one can argue with naming the room after Phil Ivey. Most everyone in the poker world today holds Ivey as the number one best, overall poker player in the universe.

The format for the $1,000,000 bounty tournament started with 250 players that would all play down to a winner who would play Phil Ivey heads up for $250,000. A number of players were given bounty status and players collected a handsome sum for knocking them out. Chino Reem had the pleasure of knocking out the largest priced bounty - Ivey himself.

When the dust had settled, a local business owner Larry Litton had bested the 250 player field. Larry had done well to get through the field but heads up vs the best player in the world was quite another story. The mano a mano didn't last very long with Ivey's Q9 spiking a Q for the win. There's no telling whether the new Ivey room will replace Bobby's room but before I left the biggest names of poker all sat down to start a game.