TCGPlayer.com has been running their tournament series in conjunction with Wizard World conventions, holding their Open Events at each of the convention locations. Last week, according to TCGPlayer.com, Wizard World cut off communication and removed all mentions of their events and site from the Wizard World site without any explanation.

As many people have noticed, Wizard World recently removed all mention of the "TCGplayer.com Wizard World Series" and the "TCGplayer.com Wizard World Series $75,000 Championship Tournament" from their webpage and also stopped all of their own internal promotions inside their digital magazine. We are not sure why they have made these changes and all attempts at contacting them - emailing, calling and sending direct mail to the heads of their company - have resulted in no replies.

Without Wizard World's involvement as a co-sponsor, TCGPlayer.com has decided to go ahead and hold their Championship event, providing the prize pool of $75,000 out of their own budget.

We have determined that due to Wizard World's actions that they are choosing to no longer be involved. As such, TCGplayer has made arrangements, completely on our own, to run a Championship Tournament for the full $75,000.00 prize pool on the same weekend and in the same city as marketed all year by Wizard World and TCGplayer. While we started the TCGplayer.com Wizard World Series with a belief that Wizard World would be involved to the end, TCGplayer.com is putting up the ENTIRE prize pool ourselves and have made separate event location arrangements to ensure our standing in not only the Magic community, but also the gaming community as a whole.

The event will take place on Aug. 13th, 2011 and Aug. 14th, 2011, with additional grinder events taking place at the Pastimes store on Aug. 12th, 2011. For more information and to read the original announcement on TCGPlayer.com, click here.

We have attempted to contact Wizard World seeking comment, but as of this publishing they could not be reached.