The £150 Deepstack £50K GTE was down today as I expected, we let 37 online satelitte qualifiers move their seats to the £100K supersized £150 Deepstack http://www.dusktilldawnpokerclub.com/events/150-deepstack-special/3368 the weekend before the UKIPT, which resulted in a £2K overlay this weekend, I don't blame players for wanting to use their seat for an event with double the GTE. However, every cloud has a silver lining
, this meant that we had some spare dealers, so I called Simon this afternoon and asked him to run a £50 UKIPT satelitte tonight and it made 3 seats with 35 runners, Club regs, Bash, Jason "Smashed Again" and Amjad bagged the seats, not ideal as I think these 3 would have bought in direct anyway 
, but it's a start (sorry guys, i mean "it's great you won a seat" 
). I have targeted to qualify a minimum of 100 Club players over the next 3/4 weeks, and we will run another UKIPT Club satelitte next Saturday 24th April at 9pm with 5 seats GTE, £50 buy-in. I have asked Alex to move the daily Early Bird Online €20 Turbo RB satelitte to 6.30pm, hopefully we can do this for Monday, I would like to see that making 2 seats as we get closer to the UKIPT, in total, I have targeted to qualify 200 players through Online and the Club, of course, I expect some overlays but they pale into insignificance when the GTE for comp is £1M. Strategy wise, we have a simple 2 point plan to scrape to the 1430 players needed;
1. Qualify as many players as possible through the Club and Online (200+ target)
2. Increase direct buy-ins from outside of England, focussing on countries that fly direct to East Midlands and Birmingham Airport (200+ target)
I have spoken to my contacts/friends in Spain, Norway, Wales, Ireland, France, Austria and Holland, a couple of them have already promised me 25+ players through their live casinos/card rooms and I fly to Dublin and Amsterdam next week to meet them. I believe that focussing on the English market will not be enough to make the £1M prizepool, when we put a £250K GTE on our March £500 Deepstack, pretty much every English poker player with £500 spare probably played it, we had 520 unique players but only 320 were actually direct buy-ins, with 200 being qualifiers, so it's not rocket science to estimate the Engliish market for £700 cash buy-ins at around 400- 500 max, plus unlike our £500 Deepstack, there is no Day 1 on Saturday so all players must take a day off work to participate.
I am enjoying this challenge, even though it's not a Dusk Till Dawn "home" event like a Monte Carlo, Grand Prix or Deepstack, each day, I update my spreadsheet and every time I get an email from our Online Shop saying "Confirmation of £700 + £70 buy-in for UKIPT", I get a real buzz, the same feeling as the first Grand Prix when noone gave us a prayer of hitting those numbers. There is a very positive mood around the whole DTD Team, everyone is working so hard, we have thought about a £1M prizepool at Dusk Till Dawn for the last couple of years and this will be our best ever chance due to the backing and brand of PokerStars.
Updated Numbers
UKIPT Summary 17/3/2012
PokerStars Qualifers 330
PokerStars Direct Buy-Ins 44
PokerStars Players 374
DTD Online Qualifers 17
DTD Club Qualifers 3
DTD Shop Buy-Ins 14
DTD Cash Desk Buy-Ins 5
DTD Players 39 (well, that is 39 more than 3 days ago!)
Total Players 413
Player Shortfall 1017
IMPORTANT: If you can only play Friday Day 1c, please buy-in ASAP either at the Club, through our Online Shop http://www.dtdshop.com/ , or through the PokerStars client, if you intend to bink a satelitte either at the Club or Online, and are successful, we can just give you your money back that you bought in with, there is 0%/zero/no chance that Friday will not sell out, we have further requests from players for 15 seats and are just awaiting wire transfers
Cheers Rob
Full Schedule http://www.dusktilldawnpokerclub.com/images/pokerstars-flyer-2012.pdf
Satelittes: http://www.dusktilldawnpoker.com/satellites/pokerstars-ukipt
PS. If you post our UKIPT news item http://www.dusktilldawnpokerclub.com/news.php?id=2232 on Facebook, Twitter, a Blog or a Forum, please drop Nicola a email nicola@dusktilldawnpoker.com. She in having a prize draw for everyone that helps her keep her job by getting 5000 unqiue views, the winner gets a £770 seat, hotel, expenses, free food and drink at the Club for the whole week. We will follow the winner's progress throughout the UKIPT, what an amazing story if he or she actually won!