The event takes place between Oct 16th and Oct 24th and the show will once again be filmed in Cardiff by Presentable. Thomas Kremser (left) and team will officiate and the direct buy in will be £6,000. No fixed deal has been agreed but Sky TV want to take the next series as the figures were very good for the first one.
As with a project this big there are loads of ends that need tidying up but here are some things that are confirmed at the moment.
William Hill Poker are adding £164,000 to the prize pool, this is an increase of 50k from last year. The plan is to have a field of 56 again with 44 invited pro's, 8 online qualifiers and this year we are hoping to run 4 land based qualifiers around Europe. The provisional destinations are England, Ireland, France and Sweden but at the moment we are still researching venues and agreeing costs. This is a pretty slow process as all the compliance officers and legal guys are checking out what we are allowed to do re. advertising and promoting these as the gambling comission are really clamping down on on the age old law of enticement.
The four land based comps will be £100 rebuys, I know this wont suit everyones pocket but the event needs to cover a 6k seat and hopefully decent prize money for the places. The winners of these seats will have all their travel and accomodation expenses covered too. When we agree venues I will let you all know.
There will be 4 online finals running fortnightly with full sats into them. The top 2 in each final qualify for the TV stage. These will be restricted to 149 (?) runners due to certain software restrictions that mean a seat would be generated for every 50 player and we only need 2 seats we can only have less than 150 runners, not ideal but we are where we are. The good news is that this year there should also be good prizes for the placed players too with the 3rd position paying over £1500 if the finals are full.
The buy-in to the final qualifier will be £120 plus £10 but there will be daily MTTs for around £13 and £26 with 1 qualifier to the final per 10 and 5 runners respectively.These will also have sats running into them from as little as £1.75 and £3.50 so we hope we have provided enough options to suit everyone's pocket.
We will also have £30 6-man sng's 24/7 with the winner qualifying for the final and the runner up getting £50.
These are the dates for the online qualifiers and all sats will run for 2 weeks prior to each one:
Sundays at 19:00 on 13th August, 27th August, 10th September and 24th September.
So that's were we are at the moment, I am busy finalising a player list that we can send out invites from and I am hoping for a field every bit as strong as last year, time will tell if we can achieve that but one very very important change from last year is that Willaim Hill will pay all travel expenses and accomodation for the invited pro's. I hope this will enable us to attract some great players from the states aswell as Europe.
Fingers crossed guys.
