Okay, for those that took the time to read my WSOP and Dusk Till Dawn diaries, and for anyone else interested, I am going to diarise the 28 days we have left till the end of Day 1c as DTD and PokerStars attempt to hit the £1M GTE at the UKIPT Nottingham Leg. So, let's start with a little background to how we have managed to find ourselves in this position just 4 weeks away from an event. Well, we have always had a little "to do list" at Dusk Till Dawn, challenges we would like to beat, some have been completed over the last 5 years but a few still remain, they are not normal business things such as make x profit, increase sales by x %, or open more Dusk Till Dawn's, just stuff we would like to do, so still on the "to do list" are;
1. Have a tournament in the Caribbean like the old Crypto CPC, just because that was me and Nicks favourite poker trip (apart from meeting Simon in Subway)
2. Have a tournament with a £1m prizepool, just because its a round number
3. Have a tournament where the winner gets £1m, again, just because when number 2 is done, we need another challenge
4. Do some sort of Poker Tour outside of the Club, dunno where, what and when, we have a remote licence, so why not, seems an interesting project
Previous things on this "to do list" were break the record for the highest number of runners in the UK (why the Grand Prix was created), have the biggest prizepool for a monthly tournament in the UK (why the monthly Deepstack was created), take 20 players to the WSOP (why we did the Las Vegas Challenge in 2010), have the best £1k event in the UK (why the Monte Carlo was created), do the WSOP structure (why we did lost £80,000 back in 2009!) and so on and so on and so on, anyway, there are 4 things left on the list.
So when PokerStars told me it was likely they would be sending 600 ish players for their UKIPT this year, 200 more than in 2010, my first thought was that we could have a crack at putting a line through number 2, which is a challenge that has been bugging me for some time. I have been saying to Kirsty (Head of UK Gaming at PokerStars) over the last few weeks that it would be great to break the £1m (thinking of our "to do list"), but it was actually her idea to GTE the event after our meeting this week. With the greatest respect, PokerStars are used to achieving multi-million pounds prizepools in their Sunday Million and EPT's, but a £1 million pound event at Dusk Till Dawn, even though its not our event, would mean a lot to the all of the DTD Team and staff. So, this is how the conversation went, after we had finished the UKIPT meeting yesterday afternoon, and Kirsty and Jamie were preparing to leave.
Kirsty (Head of UK Gaming for PokerStars)
"you can GTE £1M if you want - haha"Me
"would you really let us GTE one of your UKIPT events?"Kirsty
"why not, it's been done before in Spain, where a venue GTE'd a tour event for so and so, if you're serious, I can speak to head office"Me (turning to Nick and Simon)
"What do you reckon"Nick (puts head in hands)
"aghhhhh"Simon
"lets do it"Me (turn to Nick)
"only if Nick says its okay"Nick
"jesus (pause).... okay"Me
"Fine, lets do it, please call your head office Kirsty"5 minutes later...........Kirsty
"they said it's fine"Me
"Cool, we just need to find 830 players, Jamie, you will definitely generate 600 right?"Jamie (Pokerstars Marketing)
"erm, well, at least 500"Me
"Great, so maybe we need 930 then, you're on, 100%"Nick (head in hands) " "
So, that's how we got here, I hope PokerStars don't mind me repeating our conversations!. I'm unsure how much increasing to £700 buy-in will reduce last years direct buy-ins on the Day 1's, there we only 100 odd direct buy-ins on the day 1's at UKIPT Gallway, so what I do know is that we cannot sit back, relax, cross stuff, pray to the poker gods and expect everyone turns up on the day! In simple terms, it's like a larger version of the first Grand Prix, I guess, but this time we are working with the world's biggest poker operator, rather than on our Jack Jones. So for those that are interested, I will blog on here what we go through over the next 28 days, anything less than exactly £1m in the prize pool will be a failure right? Anything that is a lot less than £1m will be what normally happens when we have been known to miscalculate on the "odd" occasion..... First thing to do is look at the current status, and then tomorrow wake up with some sort of marketing plan and calculate how many extra players really need to be generated.
Current Status Buy-In = £700 + £70
PokerStars Qualifers = 307
PokerStars Direct Buy-Ins = 27
DTD Qualifers = 9
Total Players Registered To Date = 343
Players to hit GTE Needed = 1429
Additional Players Needed = 1086(Days remaining = 28)
Last Year's UKIPTTotal Players = 1058
Buy-In = £500 + £60
Prizepool £529,000
Cheers Rob
PS. If you have not seen the web site news here is the link
http://www.dusktilldawnpokerclub.com/news.php?id=2232 PPS. Damn, just as I am writing this, WPT have just emailed Simon and said "thank you for holding a £1M GTE event that clashes with WPT Vienna and The Party Poker Big Game", hmmm, may lose us 25-40 players, I know quite a few guys (Roberto etc) who could have defo come to the UKIPT who have been asked to play in that Big Game thing, woops, anyway, I'm an orginal EPT fan, all these new tours and comps around Europe are getting confusing, so no halm done