Rob Yong's Blog V3 "WSOP 2010 & Life After DTD Opened"

[tikay]

I don't think it was recorded, but I listened and took notes. Good interview. Good festival too, I think DTD were very happy too.

Fancy that Rich, you taking notes.

[TightEnd]

Rob Yong explains the decision to make the DTD Deepstack bi-monthly.

[TightEnd]

Rob’s £40K Grand Prix Update – 25 days to go!

 

Many club regulars will already know that we have done a deal to televise the Grand Prix and the November £300 Deepstack weekend on Virgin 1 (recently changed to Sky Channel 1) and Sky 860. The company that are filming the events, have done work for most of the major poker brands, and are talking to us about televising some of our bigger events coming up at Dusk Till Dawn, such as the £1k Grand Slam Events (starting December).

 

As it was the Grand Prix event which initially sparked an interest, this will be the first to be televised. It will be great to see some of our locals on T.V, and hopefully one of the ‘characters’ will make the final table!

 

Sigh… we now have a “massive” 81 runners bought in, so with 25 days left to enter, we need an average of 31 entries per day to break the 848 record set by Pokerstars at the EPT last week. I need your help! With the record attempt now being televised, I would like the minimum amount of egg on my face for trying this event!

 

Not surprisingly, a few of my savvy poker friends have seen this as an opportunity to make a few quid out of me by betting how many runners we will actually achieve at the Grand Prix. The general consensus is that we are going to struggle to get over 500, and I think my pride may have been getting the better of me as I have taken on some of these bets - including one quite sizable one that we will get under 600 runners!

 

This is a really fun tournament to put on. It’s not just a great structure and loads of value for £50, it’s more about having a go at something that seems unachievable. I think our largest ever field for a £50 comp is just over 300, and that was inflated because we had a Riley’s third part event the next day; quite a few players deciding to make a weekend of it.

 

Several players have questioned the 1pm start time on the Friday. To avoid an early start, we could have done a 30 minute clock or given fewer chips, but I wanted to give this event as good a structure as possible. If a player is a couple of levels late, he or she will still have plenty of chips to play. Actually, the person may have saved themselves chips by not playing the early levels and getting AA busted by J3 when the blinds are so low. As we know, some of our players such as ‘Chip Shop Frankie’ will call with any 2 cards just to Google a rock!

 

I have no shame in asking for your cooperation in getting me to a respectable number (500+ is ‘respectable’), so come on, help me out here.

 

 

Cheers Rob

[EvilPie]

Rob

If you want this to work you have to allow buy in at the club and also do the payouts in cash on the day as per the norm.

I am personally a big supporter of DTD and play there fairly regularly but I'm a bit miffed at having to buy in online and then cashout if I somehow manage to cash. If someone like myself sees it as a hassle I'm certain that plenty of others will as well.

I understand that you want people to use the cardroom and that this is a way to get them there but to combine that with an ambitious attempt at a huge field comp just won't work imo.

If you allow buy in at the club I'll register next time I'm there. If not I honestly don't know if I'll even play.

I don't want to sound harsh with this I'm just trying to be honest and supply some feedback from a personal point of view.

Cheers

Matt

[Girgy85]

Rob

If you want this to work you have to allow buy in at the club and also do the payouts in cash on the day as per the norm.

I am personally a big supporter of DTD and play there fairly regularly but I'm a bit miffed at having to buy in online and then cashout if I somehow manage to cash. If someone like myself sees it as a hassle I'm certain that plenty of others will as well.

I understand that you want people to use the cardroom and that this is a way to get them there but to combine that with an ambitious attempt at a huge field comp just won't work imo.

If you allow buy in at the club I'll register next time I'm there. If not I honestly don't know if I'll even play.

I don't want to sound harsh with this I'm just trying to be honest and supply some feedback from a personal point of view.

Cheers

Matt

^^THIS^^

[paulhouk03]

I'm in (y)

I think it would be better if you gave ppl more notice so ppl can arrange days off etc etc

Also time to spread
Also the online only thing is a good idea in theory but its next to impossible to apply into practice.

[Woodsey]

I honestly don't get the reluctance to buyin/cash out online, how difficult can it be?

[StuartHopkin]

I honestly don't get the reluctance to buyin/cash out online, how difficult can it be?

Its just insanely annoying.

Its not hard to reg, but why force it upon us?

Whether I win £75 or £13,000 I want the option of taking cash.

[BulldozerD]

I honestly don't get the reluctance to buyin/cash out online, how difficult can it be?

me neither, always use it if i can - beats queueing and stuff

however if a significant number of potential participants have a real problem with it i guess it ought to be addressed.

think main issue will be the disparate numbers between saturday and friday

[EvilPie]

I honestly don't get the reluctance to buyin/cash out online, how difficult can it be?

It's not difficult in the slightest.

It just really bugs me.

If it bugs me it must bug other people hence my suggestion to change it.

[paulhouk03]

Also I think when trying to break records u need it to be easily and conveniently accessible to as many ppl as possible 

[DaveShoelace]

I imagine that the prospect of getting people to register online accounts is good for marketing because they are added to the mailing list, and new players depositing into the online room and having any winnings put into it is good for the online business as most likely a lot of them will have a little spin up on the site rather than mess around getting it into their banks - not knocking this, I think its a good idea. I for one also prefer to get any winnings in an online account just on the off chance I get mugged (more likely than me cashing in a tourney I suppose).

But I agree with Paul, if you want to break a record you have to make it easy for everyone. How about giving some incentive like free drinks or someink if you register online?

[EvilPie]

I imagine that the prospect of getting people to register online accounts is good for marketing because they are added to the mailing list, and new players depositing into the online room and having any winnings put into it is good for the online business as most likely a lot of them will have a little spin up on the site rather than mess around getting it into their banks - not knocking this, I think its a good idea. I for one also prefer to get any winnings in an online account just on the off chance I get mugged (more likely than me cashing in a tourney I suppose).

But I agree with Paul, if you want to break a record you have to make it easy for everyone. How about giving some incentive like free drinks or someink if you register online?

You used to get half priced juice if you reg'd online. I used to do it all the time then but that stopped.

It's also a pain because it's in Euros but than discussion's been done to death.

[david3103]

My attempt at registering online generated a little extra rake for DTD. My account was close to zero and not wanting to play on the site I deposited what I thought was exactly the right amount - £56... Realising my error I decided to ust spin up the odd £2...
Losing £20 on the third or fourth hand with AA<AQ meant it took slightly longer than planned :-(

Nonetheless, I'm in!

I look forward to having the problem of finding out how to make a withdrawal

[robyong]

Hello,

I read a lot of peoples the comments on here, especially the ones on Dusk Till Dawn, for what it’s worth here of my comments on some of the recent subjects;

Quality of our Dealers

I think the quality of our dealers in the up there with any card room, when we hold larger events, we bring in self employed dealers, on the whole, these dealers are good, many of them such as Harvey are almost permanent fixtures now, but there is the odd time when a self employed dealer doesn’t work out, and we don’t bring them in again. There are also times when some of our own dealers get a bit sloppy and need a nudge in the right direction, but for every complaint about one of our dealers, we do get a lot more compliments.

Changes to Weekend Tournaments

We do change our weekend schedules around, events such as Sky, Redtooth, Pokerstars, Rileys, APAT often mean we have to shuffle our events around. We also try different things such as Super 50’s, various Deepstacks, Grand Slams, Terminators, 6 max and Twenty Twentys, some work, some don’t, its trial and error. We recently tried a £300 Deepstack a couple of weeks  after the monthly one, and it went pear shaped, we had a £80k overlay in one of £1K comps last year when we could have selected a better date, proven when we got 313 at the next one. We definately make mistakes but I think we do get more stuff right than wrong.

Overlays

Overlays in the club and online average about £10k - £15k a month, some weeks we get hit by a big one, for example, £15k when we clashed our £300 event with the Irish Open, however, we do not spend much marketing money externally, some card rooms and sites pay thousands a month to be in magazines and third party web sites, we set big guarantees as part of our marketing, sometimes we even create tournaments when we know there will almost certainly be an overlay, sometimes we don’t change our guarantees when we know we are going to get less runners due to other events happening on the same weekend, we want to be known for big prize pools relative to the buy-in, and that of course, has its risks, but means we don’t have to spend advertising and marketing in other areas. At the end of the day, an overlay is just adding to the prize pool and therefore giving money back to your customers, which hopefully they will come back and try and spin up again at the next comp.


Our Next Big Tournament

“When is the next big one” is a common question I get asked at the club, last year we did £250K GTE and £1,000 buy-in for our annual December event, we have not released details for this year yet because Pokerstars have been asking us about the possibility of a December date for their UKIPT, but that’s definitely next February now, so there is no problem hosting our annual December event, details will be on the web site soon and it will be televised.

Grand Prix

I have read some comments on here about some people not wanting to buy in online because this is a hassle for them. Over 90% of club members that have played a £50 FO or a weekend Super 50 at the club already have an online account, it takes like 2 mins to register maximum, less time that waiting in the queue for cash desk. The tournament is really targeted at our £50 regular players, not bringing in new poker players, when we did Super 50’s and Twenty Twenty’s we got 200+ people buying online for each day, it was no problem at all. We have “in house” online support, based at my head office and at the club in the evenings, so any problems can be dealt with straight away for anyone that has the slightest issue buying into the Grand Prix. The time spent posting on the subject is probably more that it would take someone to buy-in, no one says you have to play online to get into the tournament, you just have to register online, SKY Poker did this at their grand final at our club, as do most of the companies that hold events at our club, so I really think this is no big deal, I actually prefer to buy-in to all comps online myself, so I know 100% I have got a seat and I can use my online funds to do it, its so simple. The Friday 1pm start has been mentioned, well, if that doesn’t suit someone, just buy-in on Saturday, there are 400 places left!   

Television

When we opened to club, we invested in a TV table with hole cameras, a TV lighting rig and various cabling to make the club TV friendly, but apart for third party events and a bit of web streaming on our site, we have never filmed any of our own tournaments as the cost is around £30K - £40K per event.  A couple of months ago a TV gaming production company called Casino tv approached us for some poker content to go on Virgin 1 and Sky 860, we have agreed a deal to televise 5 events at Dusk Till Dawn over the coming months, which will be broadcast on Virgin 1 and Sky 860, and probably  a third channel. To be honest, I think they had already planned to do this in a venue in London, which would make more sense as they are based in London, but when they saw how easy it was to film at our club, that may have swung it. I think the viewing figures average around 200,000 on Virgin 1 at the time when the show will be broadcast, which is pretty decent as far as poker shows go, so will be great to see some of our regulars on TV, especially if they make the final table. The events agreed so far to televise are:

29th – 31 October   £50 Grand Prix (GTE £40K)

6th – 7th November   £300 Deepstack (GTE £100K)

16th – 19th December   £1000 Event (details to be confirmed)

The TV company ideally wanted a £100K prize pool for the November £300 deepstack, we could have increased the buy-in to £500 rather than try and get more runners, but that would have been too easy, so we are sticking with £300 and keeping our fingers crossed, it would be amazing to get both these events rocking for our first every televised events at the club.

VIP Room

Most of our members have noticed the VIP room has been ripped to bits and is having a new fit out, can I confirm that we are definitely NOT putting Blackjack and Roulette tables in there, I must have had 100+ people ask me that! We are just putting 3 -4 cash tables in there for higher limits, our version of Bobbys Room at the Bellagio, and therefore giving it a makeover, plus we want to make it TV friendly. Over the last 6 months Simon Trumper has been arranging bigger and bigger games at the club, and we feel that the next step is to have a dedicated area for these games. I play in the NL games regularly, and the games are getting bigger and bigger, especially at Deepstack weekends, we do have some very good players who have worked there way up to these stakes from the 50p £1 in the club, I have been trying to bust them but they are too good!

I hope this update helps,

Cheers Rob

PS. Please buy into the Grand Prix early , Nick and Simon thought I was mad to do this for a £50 comp and we only have 91 people so far, so it’s not looking too rosy