It took six years, but Chris Spencer finally has the college basketball tournament he envisioned when he first thought about playing in Las Vegas.

This weekend, he will host a sold-out event with a corporate sponsor at a resort hotel featuring a top-10 showdown on national television.

Spencer, the Cincinnati-based promoter who battled the NCAA for years for the right to see his vision realized, will have the eyes of the college basketball world on his event as top-ranked Florida and No. 10 Kansas highlight the eight-team Las Vegas Invitational at the Orleans Arena.

"Sometimes perseverance pays off," Spencer said. "But it has little to do with me. At the end of the day, it's about the teams, the players and the coaches."

The defending national champion Gators will play the Jayhawks at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in a nationally televised game on ESPN2. The rest of the field consists of Ball State, Western Kentucky, Chattanooga, Towson, Tennessee State and Prairie View.

For five years, Spencer played his tournaments at Valley High School because the NCAA would not allow him to stage the games at a hotel with a sports book that accepted bets on NCAA games.

But with the NCAA no longer sanctioning such "exempt" events, Spencer is free to have his games wherever he chooses, including arenas attached to gaming resorts.

Spencer has quickly moved to make his future tournament fields strong.

North Carolina, Louisville, Brigham Young and Creighton are committed to play in next year's Invitational at The Orleans. Kentucky and UCLA are tentatively scheduled to play in Las Vegas in 2008.

Spencer's Las Vegas Holiday Classic, set for Dec. 22 and 23 at the Orleans, will include Kansas State, Southern California, Wichita State and New Mexico. Slated for next year's Classic are Alabama, Purdue, Iowa State and Mississippi State.

"We think we can be the No. 1 college basketball tournament in the country," Spencer said of the Invitational. "Since the rule changed, I've had a lot of teams express interest in playing in our events."

Part of the allure is the format, in which the first two rounds are played on campus sites and the final two rounds in Las Vegas.

Ultimately, it's the chance to get four games for the price of one that makes Spencer's events attractive to coaches. (The event counts as only one game against a team's 27-game limit now that the NCAA has rescinded its "2-in-4 rule," which had allowed teams to play in only two "exempt" tournaments every four years.)

Playing in a popular destination such as Las Vegas is also a bonus.

Spencer's lone regret is his failure to attract UNLV to his tournaments.

"I really wanted to do business with them," Spencer said. "But they didn't want to be part of what we were doing."

The Rebels instead chose a rival promoter, Basketball Travelers, to produce their exempt event -- the Dec. 17 to 19 Duel in the Desert -- in which UNLV will face South Florida, Norfolk State and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

Jerry Koloskie, UNLV's senior associate athletic director, said the school had an issue with having other college teams using its facilities.

"We spoke to Chris several times," Koloskie said. "The problem was he wanted us to host it every year and at the time the 2-in-4 rule was in place and we could only be in it twice every four years. That, and the fact we're not playing and other colleges are playing in our arena, did not seem to make sense to us."