2015 Genting Poker Series

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.

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.