Press release today
The New Year’s plans, hatched for the new streamlined GUKPT, offering an unprecedented £300,000 in total added value over the course of the year, have been reared and now being released into the wild...
Innovations for the 2011 Tour include:
New Schedule: Please find attached the new brochure, detailing the venues, dates, and schedules for the GUKPT 2011. In brief: Seven legs of the Main Tour (including the £2,500 Grand Final in London) begin with a visit to Manchester from the 24th-30th January; full details of this first festival are being released separately soon. From May to July, the Summer Series takes over, bringing a £500 Main Event to six locations around the country, a pair at a time. Online 10% series tournaments with buy-ins ranging from £50 to £250 will be run in the gcasino.com poker room the Monday after the end of each festival, and winners of these events will qualify for the Champion of Champions Tournaments (see below) and earn Leaderboard points.
New Champion of Champions Tournaments: Instead of one yearly live event bringing together the winners from Main Tour and Summer Series events to fight for the full £100,000 of added value, this year’s champions will get to fight it out straight away over the virtual felt, with up to £20,000 up for grabs in special online events played the week following the festival in which they took their titles. Starting chips will be allocated to players dependant on the event they’ve won (10,000 for a Main Event, 4,000 for Sides up to £249, and £6,500 for higher buy-in Side Events up to a maximum of 20,000). Winners of the online 10% series tournaments also qualify.
Wild card entries: Further entries to each individual Champion of Champions leg will be given to the first player eliminated from each starting flight of Main Events, the player holding the best hand in each of the competitions during the festival, and the Lucky Draw Player (the player who is drawn on Table 5 Seat 5), so finishing runner-up doesn’t necessarily mean losing out on a place in these huge freerolls.*
Bumper GUKPT Leaderboard: This year sees a rise in prize money to £65,000 for the most consistent winners on the tour. Earn points according to events’ buy-in, number of runners, and finishing position to earn a slice of the end-of-year pie which will be distributed to the top twenty players, with the overall Leaderboard Winner receiving £26,000. The four Grosvenor Poker Leagues will also award points to the top twenty finishers.
Grosvenor Poker League: The £100,000 national poker league, now the Grosvenor Poker League, will be divided into four quarters, each with a huge £25,000 in added value. This will be divided between the top four in each league (who each win a £2,500 GUKPT Grand Final Seat) and the winners of an online playoff to be held between the top 100 finishers (excluding the top four). The top players are ranked through collecting points each week for a maximum of eight events (five live and three online), and will be joined by the top five individuals from each local club – gcasino.com included! Details are attached in the GPL Brochure.
Shoal Survivor: Rewards will be on offer to those who have qualified for Main Tour Main Events either online (at gcasino.com or bluesq.com/poker) or in one of the many live satellites at the venues themselves – including the regular Ten-Seats-Guaranteed Super Satellites which precede each festival. The qualifier from each category – live and online – who lasts the longest in any Main Event will receive the amount of the entry to the event in buy-ins. So outlast the other qualifiers in Coventry, for example, and play Blackpool’s £1,000 Main Event for free! For all Summer Series Main Events, the longest-lasting live qualifier only will receive £500 in buy-ins.
Sharky’s Giveaways: Sharky himself will be on hand at host venues prior to the festivals taking place. Play heads up live with him to win prizes, and, win or lose, enter a draw to gain free entry to the £100 Bounty Tournament.
The 2011 GUKPT promises to be the most wide-ranging and value-filled tour yet, even more rewarding to those who prove their skill over the entire year. Offering the unique Champion of Champions tournaments as a bonus after every leg promises a momentum which will last throughout the year, culminating in the Grand Final in December, which also features the £2,000 World Heads Up Championship. This, too, will feature its own satellites both live and online.
*Wild Card Player Rules: 1. If there is not a table 5 the lucky draw seat will not be available.
2. 1st out applies to main event only and will consist of the first out from each flight.
3. The best hand which will be the best hand from each event (excluding satellites) must be played to a conclusion and verified by the Supervisor.
Please see attached brochure for details of live satellites, plus information on venues and individual festival events. Details will be available soon on an all-new
www.gukpt.com website.