Poker News From Sweden

Swedish team in action

Imagine your local poker club in a vacation paradise, more than 100 kilometers from the closest larger city. Then, add a couple of poker enthusiasts backed up and sponsored by a couple of poker sites. The sum of that was a poker experience of a lifetime.



About a half-year ago, Grebbestads Poker Club put its chin out and said, "Let's do an inexpensive contest for about 400 players!" The buy-in was about €120, and the contest was filled to the last spot – 404 players, to be exact. I think this might have been the largest crowd to play on the same day in Europe; there are lots of tourneys that have a larger starting field, but they are divided into two starting days!



"This all went well," stated Glenn Simonsson, chairman of the club. "I want to do this again, but better." So, in late March, the club held an event with 600 players and a buy-in of €250.



Everyone seems to have caught the poker bug, but Scandinavians more than most. Several poker sites have realized that, and are eager to sponsor local card clubs in addition to prestigious events like the EPT and World Series of Poker. Hosting poker games outside state-owned casinos is basically illegal in Sweden, but that seems to bother neither the police nor the club owners.



At this very moment, Swedish clubs are organising themselves under SVEPOF (the Swedish Poker Federation, which is an umbrella organization for clubs and players that safeguards the rights and interests of Swedish poker players). Current discussions concern where and when to host the 2006 Swedish Championship. Thanks to the active participation of SVEPOF, the next Swedish Championship of online poker will have a record-breaking guaranteed prize pool of $2.5 million. Granted, Ladbrokes had a tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $2.5 million, but this will be a competition open only to Swedish players, and the buy-in will be $300 compared to the $1,000 that players had to cough up to participate in the Ladbrokes tournament.



Team Poker

A commonly debated question on Swedish online poker forums concerns who is the best poker player. Of course, no one knows; however, clubs are intending to find out by having a common ranking system.



Currently, a couple of clubs on the East Coast are hosting team poker leagues. Several trial tournaments have been held using this format (which is patent pending in the United States), and all who have tried it have been enchanted. In the long run, this will get entities other than poker sites interested in sponsoring the competitions. The state-owned Casino Cosmopol recently hopped on the bandwagon by hosting a team event in connection with the prestigious Nordic Masters tournament.



What makes this team poker format so unique, then? Other team events have been tried, but they have been more or less individual events in which players' individual performances have been added to get a team score. This new team-poker concept introduces a number of rules for team poker, as follows:



• Players from the same team are not allowed to sit at the same table.



• Players may change seats if the team decides to do so.



• Chip transfers between players are allowed to some extent. Thus, stacks are managed by the team, for the team.

• The teams decide which players play the available seats that the team has, based on players' strengths and weaknesses.



• At the final table, a team can take a timeout, giving it a chance to make a decision together.



Ola Brandborn is a blogger for poker.se, the meeting place for Swedish poker players. Read more about the team-poker concept at http://www.pokerteamtournament.com/.