WPT Championship dying a slow, painful death?
Back in 2006, if you thought major poker tournaments, automatically
World Poker Tour would come to mind. They had big names, big prize
pools, and for a while there, the buy in for a WPT Tourney was as big
as the World Series of Poker. This worked well for them in a lot of
ways. It attracted big names, it got armatures playing on the same
table, and even made some armatures household names (the Mizrachi clan
comes to mind..Michael got his start on WPT).
But, in recent
years their WPT Championship has been hemorrhaging chips, and players.
During their 5th season, the championship game had 600+ players
competing for a prize pool worth tens of millions of dollars. Then in
2008, they saw a dip in players, but nothing concerning.
However last year, there was only 300 players showing up for the
tourney. Not only does the pageantry of the tournament suffer, but so
does the prize pool. People who come to these tournaments for the
money took notice, and this year only 200 players showed up for the
tourney.
Daniel Negreanu, who is attending the tournament,
commented to Poker Listings “The EPT and the NAPT, and anything
PokerStars does tour wise, kicks their ass. The thing that the WPT was
always way too foolish to understand, what completely destroyed their
model as a company, was not attaching themselves to online satellites.
They need to compete and get these events popular by running online
satellites. All the PokerStars tours work because of the satellites.”
When
Partypoker purchased WPT in 2009 they had intentions of adding online
satellites to the big tourneys, however most brick and mortar casino’s
in the USA are not legally allowed to accept online satellite money as
a buy-in to a tournament.
For now it looks like the WPT will
have to abide by the rules of the land, and have to hope for a change
in the near future. In the mean time it seems that the WPT has
tentatively scheduled a season 9 World Poker Tour Championship to take
place may 21-27th, but so close to the WSOP? Not sure how that’ll
play…
