The 2024 Irish Poker Festival Main Event Gets Underway at 1 p.m.

Today, inside the magnificent Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, the first of four Main Event opening flights of the 2024 Irish Poker Festival gets underway at 1 p.m. local time. This marquee event, with a €3,000 buy-in, features a guaranteed prize pool of €700,000 and will see a host of poker enthusiasts from across the globe gather in an attempt to etch their names into the poker history books.

In 2023, Michel Molenaar of the Netherlands topped a field of 286 entrants to win the €210,000 first-place prize, marking his career-best tournament score. Molenaar defeated the United Kingdom's Tomas Macnamara heads-up, while Glen Keogh of Ireland rounded out the podium places in third.

Place	Player	Country	Prize
1	Michel Molenaar	Netherlands	€210,000
2	Tomas Macnamara	United Kingdom	€120,000
3	Glen Keogh	Ireland	€75,000
4	Liam Chevalier	Ireland	€56,500
5	Andrew Hedley	United Kingdom	€44,000
6	Richard Kellett	United Kingdom	€35,000
7	Andy Black	Ireland	€28,000
8	Padraig O'Neill	Ireland	€22,840
9	Barry Carson	United Kingdom	€18,500

Day 1a of the Main Event kicks off at 1 p.m, marking the first of four starting flights. Players begin with 50,000 chips, and each level will last 60 minutes, with blinds starting at 100/100 and a big blind ante of 100. The schedule for today is to play through ten levels with late registration remaining open until the end of Level 12, which is two levels into Day 2. If needed, players are allowed one reentry per flight.

Once play has concluded for flight 1a, the surviving players from today will reconvene with those who make it through the other three flights for Day 2, scheduled for 1 p.m. on Saturday, November 2.