blonde poker forum

http://uk.pokernews.com/news/2014/11/genting-poker-series-announced-2015-tour-dates-15641.htm

extracts from the report

The number of events has increased from eight to 10 for the 2015 season, with the GPS now heading to new locations in Liverpool Queens Square, GIC Birmingham, Reading and Luton, although all four of those new stops feature what is being labelled as the GPS Mini.

three of the eight legs in 2014 have failed to hit their £125,000 guarantee and this is reflected in the 2015 guarantees.

While the 2015 GPS Main Event still costs £400+£40 to buy into, the guarantees have been slashed to £100,000. Another cut seems to be the removal of the Grand Final and its £200,000 guarantee, one of the most popular stops on previous seasons.

2015 Genting Poker Series Schedule

Leg   Venue   Dates   Type   Buy-in   Guarantee
1   Star City   February 4-8   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000
2   Westcliff   March 18-21   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000
3   Newcastle   April 15-19   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000
4   Reading   May 14-17   GPS Mini   £200+£20   £30,000
5   Liverpool Queens Street   June 17-20   GPS Mini   £200+£20   £30,000
6   Luton   July 16-19   GPS Mini   £200+£20   £30,000
7   GIC Birmingham   TBC   GPS Mini   £200+£20   £30,000
8   Stoke   September 2-6   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000
9   Edinburgh   September 30-October 4   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000
10   Sheffield   October 28-November 1   Main Event   £400+£40   £100,000

GIC Birmingham?

No leg at dtd surprised about that

Genting in Chinatown?

I suspect this may be the new Genting gaff by Birmingham NEC. Still being built.

http://www.resortsworldbirmingham.co.uk/

I like this series and it is I think the biggest tournament all year in the West Midlands? now there is no GUKPT Walsall and the Broadway doesn't run any big tournies, so I will be playing the first leg for sure. Hope there are sats on DTD again so I don't have to play on Genting.

Hmmm, resorts world Singapore, manila, Langkawi, New York City and er.......Birmingham FAF.

Everything going downhill :(

Hope todays GUKPT doesn't overlay otherwise that'll have guarantees and buyins slashed for next year too. These are both great tours and well needed competition to stars events imo, shame to see them decline like this.

Liverpool on my birthday is my target. Fancy getting into some says for a few decent live event this year. Just need to learn how to win sats now.  I run terrible over a puny sample size.

As much as I love overlays I really hope Grosvenor top brass realise this has only not met the guarantee because of the clash with the WPT

Although I do think a monkey buyin is more suitable for this leg

Overlays so bad for the economy long term.

Agree the planning was terrible. I think GUKPT released their schedule first (pretty sure, but don't quote me) but even so, I think when DTD put a £1m GTE on, they have to backdown. All it would take would be a shift of one day even - the day twos clashing was the problem - you really had to decide between the two. Whereas a one day shift would've meant you could have a bash at both.

If Grosvenor wasn't gonna back down, then they should have just realised this was gonna happen and decided to overlay I'm sat instead.  Ensure the GTE was 'met', recoup some with sat entries/extra play, keep local low stakes and online players happy with some chances at playing a 1k for a small buy in sat/local league etc and also dilute the overlay money around to a few extra min cashes.

Since I've been playing the GUKPT sats have just stayed the same wheras every other operator have tried different thing.

You know for sure you are gonna overlay, then put on a 15 seat online GTD sat.  And quite often with these big GTD sats, word spreads and they fill up.

Don't think Blackpool should be a £500.  It's a long one to travel too for a lot of circuit regs and needs to be a £1k.

GUKPTs guarantees are the same for next season I think btw.

I didn't want to clash with GUKPT. This was the ONLY week that Rob could agree with WPT due to their commitments at WPT Paris and WPT Prague. We have done 3 back to 2000 entry events, Grand Prix, WPT Warm Up and WPT 500,  been a long 3 weeks and WPT Main not even started yet! Cheers Aces

I don't work on the GUKPT any more, but I am 99.9% confident that they're not going to reduce the guarantee going in to 2015.

The Blackpool leg of the GUKPT/UK Open/Northern Lights has always been a massive fixture for UK poker and I suspect Grosvenor weren't prepared to back down over a date that they've consistently booked in for years - especially when they're probably the first operator to release their schedule.

It's difficult with the volume of events in the UK to find a free weekend. That being said, I still think it's a little disappointing that both the Goliath and GUKPT Blackpool - both of which have become staple fixtures of the GUKPT events calendar aren't left in peace.

Sadly, as you can see with what Genting have done - the outcome is that operators will just stop committing themselves to the financial risk and play it safe. For those operating a sustainable business model, the inadvertent side effect is the poker community lose out.

What should happen is that these guys all sit down together and ensure that no one is treading on the toes of the others. It's not that difficult. Grosvenor, Genting, Pokerstars and DTD. Any other external event hosting organization that wants to host in the UK is going to have to go through one of these operators. They can ask for whatever date they want - but it can only happen if it's allowed to happen. What they should do is say, "We can do it on X, Y or Z. We can't clash." What are they going to do? Not run the event? I don't believe it. They want the revenue as much as the operator does. They'll make it happen somehow.

Having the WPT might be revenue now. But when you risk alienating other operators and it ends up costing you X amount of overlay for the next decade - I don't really see how it's commercially viable. I am not saying that's going to happen, of course - and I don't want that to sound like it's an implication. It just seems to me that what happened this weekend cannot be good for the long term future of UK poker.

GUKPT Blackpool I can understand. But the Goliath I dont. That destroyed the APAT Worlds, which always used to be the Bank Holiday weekend in August until the Goliath decided they wanted to hijack that weekend.

Dtd is single handedly taking on the big two in the uk and crushing them.  Gukpt Walsall doesn't even exist next year as a direct result of dtd in the last five years killing that card room due to being located within an hour of it.  Stoke gentings card room has been crushed in a similar manor.

Dtd online sats destroy the big two in the uk's efforts to qualify players for big events for small cost and over the past three years has slowly been eating into their market share. In 2014 grosv and genting look like they are basically given up trying to compete with dtd with their schedules for next year and gtd's.

surely its just natural competition though? gros and genting have to up their games to compete with dtd. lets be honest, if the WPTetc comes to Rob and says we have the biggest festival in the UK ever, but we can only do it in the first 3 weeks of november, do u really expect the powers that be to turn down such a chance? same way if that was offered to genting they wouldnt turn it down

This has always been my argument about DTD.

As fantastic as it is, you can't honestly expect a company to do what they're doing. What business in their right mind is going to throw away £8,000,000?

It's value for players, yes. But it isn't commercially viable as a business. I might be completely wrong and as a business they've turned the corner and they are now a sustainable enterprise - but I have always looked at Rob Yong from a business perspective and thought of him as a maniac. No disrespect to the man intended.

Yes, he has rightly raised the bar for poker and from an objective stand point I think that it's fantastic in principle. But big business doesn't think that way. They are looking at the bottom line. They don't think it's healthy or sustainable. They'll just wait for it to burn out and when the landscape has two operators as opposed to three operators, they aren't going to have to compete in the same sense that they are now.

Which is my point. The competition is good - but that's exactly the reason why you need three fish swimming in the pond instead of one or two.

That's why I think collaboration is key. If the events are locked in and held sacrosanct, then any external forces have to fit in to the margins allowed them. I don't know the answer to this, and I am not being cryptic - but if the WPT really had to happen and it was absolutely impossible to do anything then I would be on the phone and saying, "Russell. I have got something I simply cannot refuse and I have to run it X to Y. I don't want to sting you for tens of thousands of pounds. I would just like to say in advance that I think moving Blackpool might be a good idea."

Did that happen? It may well have done. I just think these guys need to work together a little bit - because if they don't then in my opinion the real loser isn't the operators. It's you.

Holland Casinos moved their MCOP back two weeks just because one their players made the WSOP FT.

That is much bigger event than the GUKPT Blackpool

If they can do it, so could Grosvenor.

loved playing GUKPT, probably the best live tournament I've played in, in terms of friendlyness, conversations, no headphones almost at all etc.

will strive to support the tour whenever im in england.

Surely collaboration in that sense is very close to operating as a cartel.  What next all deciding to put the rake up together?

I don't understand why you come away from a post about collaboration and come back with corruption.

Do me a favour. The operators that are happy to mug off the players are already doing it. Pokerstars do what they want and people still pay 10% plus have their prizepools raked on top of that. How do you expect it to get worse?

There's still competition. People can't afford to play every event - but it behoves the operators to attempt some transparency in their intentions. Else wise some of them will just stop making the effort in the first place.

If, for example, it was just pokerstars left - do you think they'd still be inclined to be more or less competitive in their rates than they are currently? Please look at what they are doing online as a tool to assist in reaching a conclusion.

Edit - for typo corrections only. No content added.

Whereas Grosvenor are the robin hood of casinos in comparison....

I am not aware that they have got a bad name in the poker industry, but it's entirely plausible that I am mistaken.

Happy to be educated. I like to hear and understand the perceptions of others.

Not so much a bad name it's just when you post it's never objective and always with bias toward Grosvenor which I understand because you work for them.

Personally I don't give a shit whether rob is a "maniac" when it comes to business. If it wasn't for Dtd you probably wouldn't have huge guarantees on comps/2525 series plus numerous deepstack events for grass root players and the great structures we now see offered on all the tours.

It's hard to believe how blind to the pay master you are when you post under your own name.  You talk about working together and collaboration but there was no mention of this when grosv thought dtd were just a fly by night operation in circa 2006 and spent a year and cost rob millions to try and send him busto during the planning stage through the courts.  This is never mentioned but I am sure certain figures will have enjoyed knowing the middle buy in wpt event of the 3 main events was going to clash with gukpt Blackpool (which is the only buy in event of the whole three week wpt festival which is direct competition to a £1k established  gukpt mainstay event.  Whether it was deliberate or not I don't know but if someone offered me a free bet on whether it was or not I think I know which side I would be backing.

  The only time you and your firm think there should be an element of team work is now dtd have blown your sorry arse (100% reactive not proactive in the last 5 years - Goliath only exists because you were losing punters hand over fist to the dtd Grand Prix and the 25/25 because the GPS undercut your main tour product and you started losing bigger staking punters as the recession deepened and people were less inclined to pay a grand for a live mtt) poker product out of the water and you are playing clear 2nd fiddle after years of dominating live uk poker.  It's become so bad that your 2nd biggest card room in your estate 10 years ago (Walsall) has been crushed so badly by dtd that it doesn't even have a gukpt leg at all next year which is quite amazing.

Would have been a good argument if Grovesnor were one of those that objected.  The objectors were Stanley, Gala and London Clubs International.   Probably why it is never mentioned!

I forgot the now grosv was a gala back in those days but it's 1.0000001 they would have done the same thing if they had a presence in nottingham in 2006.

All is cool with DTD and every other poker operator as far as I am concerned. We will do our best to always avoid clashing, not just to be nice, because it's bad for our business to clash aswell - means less players - simple. Sometimes it's just unavoidable though - if you list out the 52 weeks in 2015, put in GPS / GUKPT / 25-25 / UKIPT / WPT Accumlator , the slots left for our 4 X DTD major poker festivals are Xmas day and New Years Eve - hmmmmm.............thanks very much for publishing your schedules 15 months ahead and leaving us with those spare dates to choose from!

In terms of the GPS, we only got 650 in September because we were unable to do it justice due to focus on WPT. After the last GPS at DTD, I spoke to Genting (who I have an excellent relationship with) and said that we would be happy to do a GPS again but with more of a "DTD festival" feel to it, something that we could really get behind. I don't think a standard £100K GTD £440 buy-in GPS held at DTD adds much to their existing GPS tour, and its our strategy to focus on major events and not to duplicate the poker products that are already adequately on offer in the marketplace. My proposal is with the Genting board for consideration and hopefully in the future we can do something with Genting again at DTD.  

Thanks for all support on this WPT, gonna smoke the cigar Maria gave to me tonight after beating the 2000 :)

Cheers Rob

The Genting Poker Series amends dates and makes changes to its upcoming 2015 season. http://ow.ly/GVF55

 Aspades

Rob Y ...A maniac business man? ...No, yes? it`s just a matter of opinion... but one thing is for sure, he has done more to promote and push poker further than anyone or any group in the UK in the last 5-10 years.. that`s for sure.

Maybe he approaches it as a business (man) that loves poker... and not as a business that tolerates poker and poker players, as a necessary evil.