But hey, the 2010 Main Event champion wins more money! Hooray! And in case you don’t know who he is, here’s a refresher course:

Phil Ivey, nosebleed extroidanaire, recently confirmed to Pokerlistings.com what Doyle Brunson had mentioned earlier last week: Vegas’ big game is laying dead in the desert like it didn’t pay up.

“Once Chip Reese died it was pretty much over,” he said. “He was pretty much the backbone of the high-stakes games and now, there’s really no big game (in Las Vegas) anymore, except for during the World Series or when a tournament is in town or something like that. So yeah, there’s no real reason to be there. Four or five years ago you could count on there being a game four or five nights a week. Now there’s probably a game one or two nights.”

The Horseshoe, Bobby’s Room at Bellagio, Ivey’s Room at Aria–all kaput. You can thank Macau.

When the Asian Poker Tour (APT) made their annual stop back in November of last year, nobody would have expected the shift the big game would take. Wang Qiang, Richard Yong, Paul Phua–the three Chinese businessmen with more money than God, Oprah, and the Harry Potter lady combined that changed the landscape of the big game and helped put a stake into its Vegas heart. It would become the largest cash table of the last decade, seeing Tom “durrr” Dwan walk away up over $7 milion. As the action dwindled and the APT subsided, the show packed up like a traveling circus of the felt and was on to the next large buy-in championship tournament: this year’s Aussie Millions.

The usual Macau suspects arrived earlier this week and with them, so too did the sharks. John Juanda, Phil Ivey, Dwan, Patrick Antonius, and Eli Elezra comprised the familiar cast of cash game characters looking to join in on the $500/$1000/$100 ante No-Limit Hold’em action. With the fruition of the Aussie Millions big game table in a faraway land came a stark realization: Doyle was right.

Parlaying the interest and coverage following the high-stakes Barnum & Bailey, tourney officials made an impromptu addition yesterday to their event schedule with the new $250k Super High Roller event. Scoffing at other so-called “high roller” events, it would be the largest buy-in tournament ever assembled and featured some of the game’s premier names: Erik Seidel, Sam Trickett, David Benyamine, Chris Ferguson, Andrew Feldman, Ivey, Nikolay Evdakov, Daniel Cates, Tony Bloom, Annette Obrestad, Eugene Katchalov, Juanda, Alexander Kostritsyn, Roland de Wolfe, Dwan, James Bord, James Obst. Oh, and of course Qiang, Yong, and Phua.

The event was originally slated to be a winner-take-all affair, but a larger than expected turnout changed it to the top three seeing their cut of the prize pool. When the dust settled, it was Erik Seidel who took home the trophy and dump truck of $2,500,000, with Sam Trickett and David Benyamine taking second ($1,400,000) and third ($1,100,000). Seidel and Trickett are familiar faces at this year’s Aussie Millions: Seidel took 4th in the No-Limit Hold’em $100,000 Challenge for $625,000 and Trickett won the event for $1,525,000. Must be nice…

With Seidel’s win, he takes third all-time with $13,121,186, just under a million shy of surpassing both Negreanu and Ivey. These elite, glorified sit-and-gos, albeit the brightest minds on the felt, beg to ask the question: is the all-time money winners list losing its prestige and value? If Ivey plays Negreanu tomorrow for $10 million and it’s called a “tournament”, does that mean the winner skyrockets up the charts? Does playing one of the toughest fields ever assembled negate the fact you haven’t surpassed hundreds or thousands of other entrants to win? These “tourneys” are just becoming pissing contests as to who is more well-off to afford the bigger buy-ins, who has the biggest backers, or who’s sponsor can put the most money down on their horse. One thing’s for sure though: Seidel has 2,500,000 reasons why he doesn’t care about the answers to any of these questions.