blonde poker

Rob's weekly Update

The Grand Prix, the New Monte Carlo and £54K in Online Satellites

Well, against most people's predictions, including mine, the Grand Prix sold out at 900 players with 8 days to go.

Since then, we have been inundated with requests to increase the field by adding an extra Day 1 on Thursday. However, the 45 minute clock and 10,000 chip structure means that we wouldn't finish at a suitable time for the filming, or for our gaming licence.

Looking at the emails to our support team and in the club, this event was oversubscribed by as least 400 – 500 players. This obviously means a field of 1300 – 1500 people is possible for us in the future. For now, I want to see how we cope with the 900 guests over Friday - Sunday, before we look at doing this type of event again. The Norwegian Poker Championships, and the Pokerstars UKIPT were big events, but the Grand Prix will be the most demanding so far due the sheer amount of entries in the tournament. We estimate Saturday could see us having over 800 people in the building; it's a good job that we have been able to get the marquee at short notice!

Events such as the Grand Prix and Monte Carlo are important. We need to keep the interest levels up, especially after now being open for 3 years. When we hold a bigger buy-in event, we always try and give our regular day to day customers the chance to qualify. £1090 for the Monte Carlo Event is a lot of money in this current economic climate, so we are guaranteeing 50 Monte Carlo seats in online satellites, worth over £54,000. These will commence 5 weeks before the event itself, so people can plan to take time off work if they qualify. Day 1 is on a Friday.

There has been a big focus on our weekend events over the last few weeks, adopting the Grand Prix model, giving players big prize pools for lower buy-ins. We do know that the weekday evening tournaments also need to be freshened up, so from Wednesday 10th November, a new evening schedule will commence. Details will follow shortly.

Thanks again to everyone that has supported the Grand Prix. We are all very proud to be on course (provided everyone turns up) to break the UK record on our first attempt. We set the guarantee higher than the number of players we thought we would get, so it's been a great surprise to sell out at our 900 cap so quickly. It's given us all at Dusk Till Dawn a boost!

Cheers, Rob