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It seems that everything’s just a bit richer in Macau. According to an interview published in GamingToday with William Murray, an American businessman, a new poker tournament entitled the Macau Pro Am Open may be coming to China in the spring of 2013. Why would anyone care about a poker tournament that’s over a year and a half away, at best? Simple: it’ll have a prize pool of $100 million, if organizers get their way.

Murray stated that different Chinese companies are currently collaborating on what would be the world’s richest poker tournament by a huge margin. As of now, the goal is to create a prize pool of $100 million, though it would apparently still run with as little as $65 million. The grand prize would be up to $25 million, nearly three times larger than what Pius Heinz won earlier this month in the WSOP Main Event.

With such a massive planned prize pool, you’d expect the Macau Pro Am Open to shoot for at least 10,000 participants, similar to the World Series of Poker. You’d be wrong, however, as Murray is stating that the event will only include around 500 participants, ideally with 33% from the U.S., 33% from the Far East and the remaining portion from other areas of the world (presumably Europe, of course).

Some quick math indicates that each of the 500 runners would need to pay buy-ins of $200k per person in order to generate a $100 million prize pool. Best of luck to Murray and the other organizers, given that the PCA Super High Roller earlier this year attracted just 38 players with a $100k buy-in. The goal could be more easily obtained if sponsors pitched in some prize money, although it seems more logical to open the tournament to at least a few thousand more players, especially given the “Open” in the title.