Rob’s £40K Grand Prix Update – 25 days to go!
Many club regulars will already know that we have done a deal to televise the Grand Prix and the November £300 Deepstack weekend on Virgin 1 (recently changed to Sky Channel 1) and Sky 860. The company that are filming the events, have done work for most of the major poker brands, and are talking to us about televising some of our bigger events coming up at Dusk Till Dawn, such as the £1k Grand Slam Events (starting December).
As it was the Grand Prix event which initially sparked an interest, this will be the first to be televised. It will be great to see some of our locals on T.V, and hopefully one of the ‘characters’ will make the final table!
Sigh… we now have a “massive” 81 runners bought in, so with 25 days left to enter, we need an average of 31 entries per day to break the 848 record set by Pokerstars at the EPT last week. I need your help! With the record attempt now being televised, I would like the minimum amount of egg on my face for trying this event!
Not surprisingly, a few of my savvy poker friends have seen this as an opportunity to make a few quid out of me by betting how many runners we will actually achieve at the Grand Prix. The general consensus is that we are going to struggle to get over 500, and I think my pride may have been getting the better of me as I have taken on some of these bets - including one quite sizable one that we will get under 600 runners!
This is a really fun tournament to put on. It’s not just a great structure and loads of value for £50, it’s more about having a go at something that seems unachievable. I think our largest ever field for a £50 comp is just over 300, and that was inflated because we had a Riley’s third part event the next day; quite a few players deciding to make a weekend of it.
Several players have questioned the 1pm start time on the Friday. To avoid an early start, we could have done a 30 minute clock or given fewer chips, but I wanted to give this event as good a structure as possible. If a player is a couple of levels late, he or she will still have plenty of chips to play. Actually, the person may have saved themselves chips by not playing the early levels and getting AA busted by J3 when the blinds are so low. As we know, some of our players such as ‘Chip Shop Frankie’ will call with any 2 cards just to Google a rock!
I have no shame in asking for your cooperation in getting me to a respectable number (500+ is ‘respectable’), so come on, help me out here.
Cheers Rob