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Press release

GUKPT 2011

As the 2010 Grosvenor UK Poker Tour draws to a close, next year’s streamlined series of poker festivals is already on the horizon.  Each month will see one of the country’s most popular Grosvenor or G Casinos host either a £1,000 Main Event as part of a GUKPT leg, or, from May to June, a double venue Summer Series.   The London leg in March is an exception, with its Main Event having a buy-in of £1,500, and the 2011 Grand Final returns to the capital to see the year out with a deeper-stacked £2,500 Main Event.  In all, 13 different venues will crown champions in 2011, award millions of pounds in prize money and set the leaderboard challenge.

New For 2011

The new GUKPT will have a huge £200,000 of added value, including an even more rewarding points-based leaderboard, with £75,000 allocated for the most successful players of the tour over the whole year.  Points will be awarded to the top finishers in every Main and side event dependant on the number of entrants, buy-in and finishing position, and will be accumulated throughout the year with the standings being updated on www.gukpt.com.   There will be more innovation for 2011, bringing individual added value to each leg of the GUKPT; details coming soon…

GUKPT to Cross the Irish Channel

In the Autumn of 2011, for the first time, a leg of the GUKPT will be hosted in Ireland.  Long attracting a wide variety of players both locally and from further afield, the tour will now bring the professionally-run deep-stacked tournaments which have become the staple of the UK’s live poker circuit to one of the best places to play the game.  The Irish poker scene has been growing year on year and there is no shortage of talented players waiting to give the GUKPT regulars a run for their money.

GUKPT 2011 Provisional Schedule

January 24th - 30th (Main event: £1,000) Manchester

March 14th -20th  (Main event: £1,500) London Victoria

April 25th - 1st May (Main event: £1,000) Walsall

May 12th - 15th Summer series: Brighton & Dundee

June 9th - 12th Summer series: Bolton & Plymouth

July 7th - 10th Summer series: Sheffield & Southampton

August 15th - 21st (Main event: £1,000) Luton

September - Ireland (Main event) TBC

October 10th -16th (Main event: £1,000) Coventry

November 7th - 13th (Main event: £1,000) Blackpool

November 21st - 4th December (Grand final: £2,500), Plus World Heads Up Championship (£2,000) & Champion of Champions, London Victoria

sigh at moving the manchester leg to full on clash with aussie millions and jake's ept

completely selfish comment i know, but i still think it's bad planning for gukpt's to ever clash with ept's; it instantly removes 10-20 players from the field

Definitely this. Schedules are known in advance, no real excuse for clashes

Have they moved Ireland to the UK now?

Hmm, had a feeling with all of grosvenor leeds' recent activity they might at least get a summer series game in there. Apparantly not..

Very surprising they have got rid of Brighton as a main leg of the tour.

doesnt seem vastly dissimilar to last year.  why not scrap the 200k leaderboard or w/e and just put a 200k gtd on every event

+1000

meh i think the leaderboard is a good thing, especially for the prosperity of the side events

guarentee's on the main events would be the nuts tho

A much better way to spend the 200k?

Add 10k to each main event and make all side events juice free.

That way every player potentially benefits, not just the handful at the top of the leaderboard who have presumably won plenty during the year anyways.

I know that Neil Channing has hypothecated something similar, but with the UKIPT encroaching so much on the GUKPT patch with the vast in built advantage of selling out every time because of the volume of online qualifiers they can generate

- Bump the GUKPT buy ins up to £2500

- Give the qualifer satellites to Full Tilt splitting the revenue (as with the best will in the world sats on GCasino.com aren't going to get the numbers)

- Give the £500-1000 buy in market to Stars and go up the scale, half way to an EPT buy in

- Stop trying to protect side event numbers with the CofC/leaderboard etc and add value to every main event instead


 

I've been chatting to the guys at Grosvenor to put over the player's view of what they do well and what they don't do well. There are a lot of changes, some of which haven't yet been finalised and therefore announced, but they will be in the coming weeks. I think it's safe to say the Champion of Champions event at the end of the year will be scrapped or changed significantly so that the money put into that is now used to boost numbers throughout the tour.

All of the ideas on this thread have been discussed in the past few months, some of them plainly aren't feasible, some it was thought there were better solutions. I'm not really sure what I'm allowed to post in terms of what's definite, but even though I made the Champions of Champions in both the past two years and will play this year's, I didn't really think it was that exciting of an event, adding seats to it didn't make people want to play an events particularly, with some even rumbling on about 'why would I want to travel to Luton/Coventry in December, pay for travel and hotel to play a comp where everyone has more chips, can I have some money instead pls'.

The replacement mooted, which will be a champion of champion for each leg played probably the week after online, seems a much better idea to me (and easier to win a decent sum from too). If you're umming and ahhing over playing the £100 in Manchester in January, telling u there's a freeroll in December in Coventry if u win isn't gonna whet your appetite, tellin u u have a chance to win a further £5k in an online sng against the week's other winners (for example!) is much more likely to boost numbers imo.

The leaderboard is different. It really does make people want to play more events to chase the free money (hence I'm still in Blackpool playing side events, sigh). I think that will stay, I hope so, I don't knnow why more people don't chase the free money.

As for clashing, they try and avoid the DTD deepstacks, the UKIPTs and the EPTs. Complaining a leg clashes with a 10k event on the other side of the world is pretty funny, with all the events in the world they can't avoid everything. The EPT has two events in January and one in early Feb, what with the DTD events to avoid (which would probably take more runners away than a 10k event a million miles away), u either have to give up an event in Jan or unfortunately clash with an EPT, whoever won it last year.

EPTs don't take many runners away at all, how many played Doh-ville last year? Even Jake didn't buy in. And those that do play often aren't the sorts who travel to northern GUKPTs, they may play the ones in and around London (I don't think either of the people who posted complaining about the clash have travelled to Blackpool this week for example, presumably too far, and there's no clash this week).

Satellite qualifiers obv need to be upped so they’re putting a lot of money into this. Guaranteeing seats on and offline (the £250fo on a Sunday on Gcasino poker/Blue Sq) currently guarantees four seats and has missed the guarantee a few times. As it hit’s the guarantee they will up the number of seats guaranteed so they’re just missing it again until they hit it, then up again. There will also be a ‘last longer’ for each leg for the qualifiers to give an incentive to people to try and sat in. Hopefully they can find a way of getting each club to have weekly sats to play GUKPTs throughout the year, that would be ideal. Allowing a rival site to run your sats, like Full Tilt, is obviously not gonna happen, why would u ask your customers to go and play on another site?! I hope whoever suggested that never runs their own cardroom J


My opinion on upping the buy in was that will suit Channing but not many others. It will price out a lot of the recreational players, make the satellites even harder to fill and make them a lot smaller. Remember Neil was the one who requested Raaby put a £5k hu into the schedule last year, it ended up getting six runners even Neil didn't bother playing.

Other things in the pipeline are potential tv coverage again and possible guarantees on main events (obv this is risky so not sure if they'll go for it, I hope they do tho) among other things. It’s obv a tougher market these days, and the UKIPT is more competition, but I like the ideas and improvements on what was already a really good tour. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that UK players have won an awful lot of big comps in Europe and America since the GUKPT launched. Alot of us would miss it and the value if it wasn't around.....

meh think more ppl willing to go to manchester than blackpool

there were 12-15 ppl who were either in australia or france last january who i think would probably of played a manchester gukpt if they were home for it

but like i said it was an entirely selfish comment

Nice post Jeff (and nice dig at the full tilt idea lol)

I think the point that lies behind my comment on satellites is that with the best will in the world gcasino.com will not get the runners for GUKPT satellites...I don't see them promoted anywhere..either on any forum or in cardrooms and (just from an outside view looking in) the arm with the real promotional clout BlueSq appears to have been sidelined in the GUKPT process....and at the same time numbers at GUKPTs are down on last year and about 25% down on 2008. Some of this will be economy related, some will be competition related

Unless the marketing of the sats steps up, they are better off being held where a lot of runners can be attracted, on some sort of revenue share basis. Of course it won't happen, as the online poker world doesn't work like that....but the lack of satellite qualifiers is a big achilles heel to field size compared to UKIPTs, especially

Will play London and that's it, no Brighton is a shame.

Now that me an Jeff are best buddies again ! Just like to say great post with alot of positve views!

hehe all in jest tighty ofc.

Obv it's difficult with stars generating so many satellite runers but some of the money that was used previously for the champion of champions etc is now earmarked to up guarentess on both live and online sats. Add to that that online and live qualifiers will now get added incentives (think the way paddy power does it with the irish open and the last survivor, obv on a smaller scale as the comps are monthly but still nice perks for sateliters to encourage them).

The four seats guarenteed sats on a sunday started with only 10 runners which was nice, now they are getting up to cover the guarentee they will guarentee that at 5 until they are losing money again and up it again etc. Hopefully they will find a way of getting regular players into the bigger comps....think the way that massive tourney in belgium runs in october...every club in belgium has satellites to it every week all year, all aiming to play the big comp with the big money. If they can recreate that with say the regular players in Luton, all playing £20, £30 or £50 comps weekly to try and get in the Luton leg, it will be a great step forward, and something Stars cannot do (as they have no casinos).

The sats this week in Blackpool were pretty huge, which boosted those numbers, think they had 100 runners for the weds sat, it was bigger than the main comp that night, the plo.

As an aside, I also liked the Brighton leg, its a fun place to go, but not enough local runners means it's not a big enough comp which is a shame, but I guess everyone who lives in a city where there is not a tour leg wishes they had one on their doorstep but there's not really much point posting it

ha, thanks pete and ul in blackpool....at the pokers i mean, your luck seemed ok the rest of the time...mw trigg has never been seen since