Poker players from all over the world have converged on the Crown Melbourne Resort to participate in the 19th annual Aussie Millions Poker Championship tournament series this week. Highlighted as the marquee event of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT), this year’s series features 24 events spread over 18 days, with buy-ins ranging from AU$1,150 to AU$250,000.

Players are vying for a piece of an estimated AU$30 million prize pool and have the chance to win one of the coveted Aussie Millions LK Boutique championship rings awarded to the winner of each event.

While Aussie Millions is now one of the most popular tournaments on the international poker circuit, it has grown from humble beginnings. The Crown Melbourne introduced poker to its casino in 1997, some six years before Chris Moneymaker sparked a worldwide poker boom with his stunning 2003 WSOP Main Event win.

In July 1998, the inaugural Crown Australian Poker Championship, which would later be renamed the “Aussie Millions,” was born, boasting a AU$1,000 buy-in Limit Hold‘em main event. The fledgling tournament attracted just 74 entrants and generated a modest prize pool of AU$74,000. Australian Alex Horowitz went on to win the AU$25,900 first-place prize and become the event’s first champion.

The following year, organizers decided to switch the main event format to Pot Limit Hold’em, then settled on No Limit Hold‘em for the 2000 iteration. One year later, the tournament was rescheduled to January, but still remained a mostly local affair, with Australians dominating the top nine places nearly every year.

In 2003, online poker began to garner mainstream appeal, and interest in No Limit Hold’em was growing worldwide. That year, the main event had 122 entrants, each of whom paid the AU$10,000 buy-in for chance at the AU$1.2 million prize pool. This time, players from three countries populated the leaderboard, with England’s Peter Costa taking first place in the main event for AU$394,807.

In 2005, things got serious. The main event boasted a record 263 participants and a hefty AU$2.6 million prize pool, with AU$1 million going to first place. This was the year that the series became a truly international event, with half the field making the overseas trip from Ireland, England, Norway, New Zealand, USA, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Canada and Lebanon.

The following year, the tournament continued to grow almost exponentially, this time attracting 418 players, including big-name pros like Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu and Australian WSOP champion Joe Hachem. New Zealand’s Lee Nelson took a AU$1.3 million slice of the AU$4.1 million total prize pool for his main event win.

The 2006 tournament also saw tournament take a giant leap with the introduction of the $100,000 No Limit Hold’em Challenge, the biggest buy-in tournament in the history of poker at the time. Only 10 players participated in the inaugural high stakes event, with John Juanda taking the AU$1 million top prize. While the six-figure buy-in tourney pales in comparison to events like the $1 million Big One for One Drop, the Aussie Millions was clearly a pioneer in the high roller trend.

Series organizers have used these high buy-in tournaments to experiment with some unorthodox rules. Aussie Millions is one of the few major tournaments to offer events which enforce a shot clock, in which players are given a period of 30 seconds or less to make their decision. The series also spreads events that feature some interesting quirks, like only allowing pot limit betting pre-flop, and no limit betting post-flop.

The reverberations of 2006’s UIGEA legislation had not yet been felt at Asia-Pacific’s most popular tournament series, however, with a record-high 747 participants entering the 2007 main event just months after a number of online operators left the US market. Danish poker legend Gus Hansen prevailed after besting American online poker specialist Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke for a AU$1.5 million payday.

Hansen later wrote a book called Every Hand Revealed, in which he broke down his thought process on key hands he played during the tournament. To keep track of his playing history, he described using a portable recorder to dictate the details of each hand during breaks.

Attendance at the Aussie Millions main event peaked in 2008 when 780 players entered to create a prize pool of AU$7.7 million. Russian grinder Alexander Kostritsyn bested legend Erik Seidel to take first-place and the AU$1.65 million prize, the largest ever awarded at a live tournament in the southern hemisphere at the time. Seidel, for his efforts, took home a consolation prize of AU$1 million.

The Crown Melbourne partnered with Fox Sports Net (FSN) to broadcast the 2007 and 2008 main events, introducing the series to a large mainstream audience in the United States.

In 2009, Australian Stuart Scott took home a record AU$2 million first-place prize after topping a field of 681 entrants. Likewise, Australian-born David Steicke snagged first place in the AU$100,000 challenge for AU$1.2 million. That year, the casino continued its partnership with FSN, which broadcasted the tournament to 81 million homes.

2010 saw a bump in participation from the previous year, with 746 players in the main event. Sydney’s Tyron Krost won AU$ for beating a final table that included Sorel Mizzi, Peter Jetten and Annette Obrestad.

In 2011, Aussie Millions pushed the envelope again by offering a AU$250,000 buy-in super high roller tournament, then the largest on record. The event drew 20 entrants and saw Erik Seidel take first-place for massive AU$2.5 million prize. The biggest story that year may have been the emergence of the “Macau businessmen” from the shadows of cash game lore. Richard Yong, Paul Phua, and Wang Qiang played the Main Event, and both the $100,000 Challenge and the $250,000 Challenge.

The Australians were back on top in the 2012 main event, with local Oliver Speidel besting a field of 659 for a AU$1.6 million payday.

While Speidel was the local hero, 2012 saw the start of Phil Ivey’s extraordinary string of wins in the LK Boutique $250,000 Challenge. That year, Ivey bested 16 of the world’s best poker players to take home the AU$2 million first place prize. In 2014, Ivey dominated again, this time topping a field of 30 and taking home an even bigger AU$4 million haul.

But the 39-year-old poker pro still wasn’t finished. In 2015, Ivey navigated his way through a field of 25 to win his third LK Boutique $250,000 Challenge crown, along with AU$2.2 million.

Between the 2013 and 2014 Aussie Millions, Crown Casino played host to WSOP-APAC and used that tournament to introduce a new tournament format – “The Accumulator”. Players could enter all three flights of the event and accumulate chips each day, combining all remaining stacks before the start of Day 2. The event was then added to the 2014 Aussie Million schedule.

The Aussie Millions has developed into one of the most important stops on the global poker circuit. Crown’s willingness to innovate by experimenting with new formats coupled with its bold decision to offer some of the biggest buy-in tournaments in the world has made the series a must-attend event for seasoned poker pros and amateurs alike.