The European Poker Tour: Season Two

Herbert O. Yardley, author of The Education of a Poker Player, wrote a brief outline of poker etiquette that included the command, "No griping." This wonderfully expressive word – gripe – is of American derivation, and its meaning hardly needs explaining to anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in the company of professional poker players. For those who have not had the pleasure of that experience, here is a dictionary definition:



v. Gripe: to complain naggingly or petulantly; to grumble; to have sharp pains in the bowels, to oppress or afflict, to irritate; annoy, as in, "His petty complaints really gripe me."


Season two of the European Poker Tour (EPT) has seen soaring numbers and ballooning prize pools, and quite a lot of griping, too. Let me be frank. There was a fair amount of criticism aimed at the EPT, much of it coming from respected professionals, cheered on by our eloquent friends in the blogging community. The word "crapshoot" was uttered on more than one occasion. Regretfully, the dissenters had a point.



Much of the problem stemmed from the opening event of the EPT in Barcelona last September. I absolutely loved this event, and I believe that most of the participants had a great time by the Mediterranean, enjoying the poker and the late-summer sunshine. A final TV table at the Casino Barcelona featuring Gus Hansen, Patric Antonius, and Jan Boubli will be a real treat for armchair TV poker fans when the show airs in January.



The problem, however, was with the event's unexpected popularity. The season one event had 227 runners for a €1,000 tournament, and despite raising the buy-in to €4,000, the organisers were hoping for a similar turnout in season two. Instead, they had 325 runners, with several more disappointed players unable to secure a seat. The craving for EPT action was such that some players were aggressively offering over the odds, just for the rights to a seat. Noses were put out of joint. Players felt afflicted and oppressed. Some even suffered a sharp pain in the bowels.



The organisers have since put their hands up and admitted that the wave of players took them by surprise, and that they'd made a mistake in not clearly announcing a cap well in advance. If they had correctly anticipated the numbers, they surely would have made Barcelona a three-day tournament. As it happened, the two-day tournament ended up with a faster structure than was appropriate for a €4,000 buy-in event.



"I must say that we really tried to please everybody, and we worked our socks off that week in Barcelona," said EPT Tournament Director Thomas Kremser. "In the end, we got all but four players from the waiting list into the tournament. I don't think anybody could have expected that many runners for a buy-in that was four times bigger than the year before."



"There were far more players than anticipated, and this meant that the structure had to be speeded up in order for us to finish on time," explained EPT supremo John Duthie. "It was this that led us to completely rethink the structures, so, in effect, something good has come out of it."



John and Thomas have listened, observed, and taken the appropriate action, announcing an overhaul of the structures to make sure that all future EPT events will be player-friendly tournaments.



Step one will be announcing a cap for each tournament in advance so that players can see if there is likely to be a sellout. Step number two will be the introduction of 60-minute levels as standard practice for all EPT tournaments, except for the Monte Carlo EPT Grand Final, which will have 90-minute levels. Step three will see all EPT tournaments made three-day events or longer. Finally, in order to accommodate as many players as possible, while maintaining a comfortable structure, all remaining tournaments in season two of the EPT (Copenhagen, Deauville, and Monte Carlo) will have day 1a and day 1b flights.



"From a player's point of view, this reduces the luck factor significantly, in that a player can survive a dry run of cards, whereas before he would always be under pressure to play a hand," said Duthie, a poker pro himself. "I suspect we will see the better and more skillful players surviving longer with the new structures. The overall prize pool obviously increases as a result of the larger number of players, too.



"Aside from that, the feedback has been extremely positive, and we sold out the Dublin event well in advance. Last year, Dublin had 165 players in a €1,500 buy-in event, and this time we had 250 for a €4,000 buy-in so the EPT is continuing to go in the right direction. That makes these structural changes all the more important; we have to plan for success, and ensure that players receive the best possible treatment in each tournament.



"The EPT adds on €60,000 in the form of free entries for the winners of the regular-season EPT tournaments to the €10,000 grand final in Monte Carlo in March, which is rarely acknowledged. The World Poker Tour takes this entry fee out of the prize pool, whereas we add it on."



The new flights mean a slight change to the dates, some of which have been brought forward by one day.

Now there really is no excuse: No griping!



I addressed the issue of the Scandinavian domination of European poker in a previous column, and there was another example of this trend at the Dublin EPT event in October. There were three Irish and three British players at the final table, but it was the two Swedes who took home nearly half a million euro between them. Henric Olander dominated the final table as thoroughly as Ram Vaswani did last year, but he couldn't close the deal because the only player who could work him out was 26-year-old Mats Gavatin, another Swede. Gavatin, a former baker from Stockholm, hung on to Olander grimly, and then in the heads-up battle, he dismantled his rival with surprising ease to produce a predictable result: Sweden first and second.

Conrad Brunner works for PokerStars.com.