After we finished at the office we went back to my house and played a £20 sit and go which Chubbs ended up winning after beating Nighfly heads-up. I have to say that Nightfly is probably the worst poker player I have ever come accross in my whole life, calling all-in on a AKJ flop with Q2 offsuit to knock Nick out.
I tried to get accross to everyone the scale of the project that we are undertaking. I have a certain strategy that I feel we should adopt, doing things slowly and in logical stages but making sure we get things right. For example. I am almost certain that when we first open we will not be able to open 7 days a week, because we will not be able to recruit, train and manage the 65 staff that are needed to run a full week operation, nor will we have time between opening times to fix the things that go wrong.
We are not experienced professional in this industry, and consequently, we should not "run before we can walk". We have to know and accept our limitations and set our objectives accrodingly. Of course, in time, I want the club to open every day at 12pm (2pm for poker) till 6am (4am on Satudays), but we can only do this when we have the infrastructure and most importantly, enough competent staff to do so. Clearly this may mean we lose more money that budgeted in the first year of business, but it will mean that we do things right in the long term.
Due to being banned from the Broadway, me, Chubbs and Nick went to Sheffield to play the main event £1000 FO. Me and Nick busted out early, me on an all-in river bluff and Nick with trip K's (Dave Smith said "guess I need 2 clubs" and they came!). The good news is that Chubbs ended up winning the £14,800 first prize so the DTD poker tour is now in profit! When Chubbs got to the final 5 players we had an interesting conversation which went like this:
Chubbs: "They are mentioning a deal, what should I do? What if it make financial sense? We can't really do deals after what you posted about deals on Blondepoker, can we? (I posted that it is likely that DTD will be a "non deal" venue with a flatter payout structure)
Me: "Correct. No deals, whatever happens"
Chubbs: "Cool, we gotta practice what we preach"
No deal was done and Chubbs played fantastic and won it outright - it was great to railbird and all the spectators had a great time. The staff at Sheffield are so friendly and asked me if they would be able to play poker in DTD when it opens,"hopefully, if your boss agrees to it", I replied. Something that I have on my list to do is to contact all of the casinos and invite them to the club when it opens. I will show them that we have no intention to compete with their "core business" and try and persuade with them to allow their employee to come to DTD.
Many casino staff, especially dealers, love playing poker but are not allowed to fo to rival casinos to play. There is no legal reason why any employee of a casino cannot play poker at DTD as long as their employer agrees to it. At the moment this seems a pretty remote possibility, but I will work to make it happen even if we get knocked back at first. If I can just persuade 1 of the casino groups, even a smaller one such as Napoleans, I think eventually we could get over this hurdle.
I'm off to Sweden in 1 hr with Chubbs to meet with one of the online software providers. Its a right nightmare journey but we have got to make the effort to meet these people face to face and more importantly, see their infrastructure and support with our own eyes. It may seem a bit old fashioned in this new world of cyberspace, but I just prefer face to face meetings.
