Poker News

Jonathan Raab

The European Poker Tour, which for the last three years has been the major attraction on this side of the Atlantic, has suffered in the last couple of months. The organizers made the tricky decision to raise the cost of the buy-in from ?5,000 to ?8,000 for its fourth season. This decision was widely criticized. The first event of the season, held in Barcelona attracted record numbers, so it seemed for a short while that this increase of 60 percent in the cost to play was the correct move. However, for subsequent events in Baden, London, and Dublin, a more worryingdownward trend has set in.

The Austrian event in Baden attracted 281 players compared with 331 in 2006, while the London event just about held firm with 392 players compared to 398 the previous year. However, at the recent event in Dublin numbers were way off last year’s total of 389 players. Just 221 turned out this year for what should have been one of the best attended stops on the EPT calendar.

Ireland is no stranger to hosting huge poker tournaments and indeed this year’s Irish Open in April attracted 708 runners, the biggest field ever for a major European event. But huge numbers failed to show up this time around and noticeably there were very few Irish players taking part.

The EPT has fallen into the trap of becoming too big for itself and demand for seats at the newly inflated price have not met expectations. At ?5,000 it had found its ideal level, but at ?8,000 it is out of the price range of the majority of pros in Europe. With eleven events now on the EPT calendar, compared to eight last season, there is simply not enough money going around to fill each event with upwards of 400 players.

The existence of other poker tours, such as the GUKPT in Britain, provides a cheaper alternative for those seeking the big game experience. For the cost of an EPT buy-in, one could play in five GUKPT events. Those who do choose to play on the EPT are probably budgeting to play in only one or two events, rather than playing in all of them, as many had done in previous years.

There is a tendency for organizers to want every event to be bigger and better than the last and for the prize pools to keep on getting larger. However, when something is working well, there is no point in trying to fix it, and EPT supremo John Duthie is now faced with the dilemma of what to do with the remaining events scheduled this season.

The correct play would be to reduce the buy-in to this season’s remaining events to ?5,000, but this may not happen and would be seen as an admission of failure. Even though it is tough to admit that you have gotten things wrong, it is sometimes the best course of action.

It’s not essential for the prize pools to be bigger every year. The EPT should concentrate on running the events as well as they can rather than chasing a gargantuan prize pool at the end of a never-ending rainbow. The low turnout also affected the side events and cash action, which was meager, to say the least. The event itself was eventually won by American Reuben Peters, an online qualifier, who defeated WSOPE winner Annette Obrestad in a relatively short-lived final table.

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