As the grand finale of the prestigious Nordic Masters of Poker at Casino Cosmopol in Stockholm, a team poker tournament with a revolutionizing concept was held.
"We feel it was a huge success," said Cardroom Manager Tiina Korpela. "This is a new dimension of poker that can bring more people to the game. If we can find a good deal with the owners of the concept, there is a big chance that we will use the format in our upcoming poker events at Casino Cosmopol."
Despite the relatively low admission fee of $2,000 per team, most of the Swedish poker elite found its way there, along with teams from Finland, Norway, and Denmark, and admissions closed with all seats sold out almost a week before the event started.
New rules
What separates this format of team poker from others are, apart from some minor rules, mainly three things:
1. Players from the same team can never be at the same table. Special software has been developed to maintain full control and handle the seating and rearranging of tables.
2. Each team has a number of seats that it controls, and its members decide internally how they want to place their players in those seats. This means that a player is not out of the contest in the traditional sense until the whole team has lost all of its members' collective chips. A player can be reused infinitely, and seated almost immediately to replace another team player. This opens up another more strategic dimension of team poker – as some players do very well maintaining a big stack and others do well building from small stacks, some prefer shorthanded play and others do better playing in a full-ring game, and so on. In team poker, the team coach and the team decide how to get optimal performances out of the team's players, just like many other team sports such as football or baseball.
3. The chips that the players receive at the start are no longer personal for that seat/player, but belong to the whole team. They can be administered by taking a percentage from one stack and moving it to another stack – for instance, because that stack is getting too small, or just to even out all of the team stacks in order to hold an average stack at all tables, or to have three short stacks and one huge one. This is, in itself, also a strategic dimension to be handled by the team to get optimal performance at each table. Maneuvering the chips and taking care to observe the other teams' movements from a more birdlike perspective gets increasingly important.
There are also a few minor extra features, like the fact that the teams have optional timeouts at the master table (like a final table) to decide on a joint decision in crucial situations. It's a very good feature for a televised tournament.
The idea
"I got the idea of this format of team poker by a coincidence," Carl Stefan Gustavsson said. "I had just played in a fairly cheap tournament in the south of Sweden, and after leaving, I picked up a poker magazine and began to read some of the articles. I remember reading about Christer Johansson – who, by the way, was playing in the same tournament I had just left, and was even at my table – and then my eye caught an article about team tournaments. The tournament was held in St. Petersburg, and there were some comments about players from the same team colluding. I immediately began thinking about how to improve the format, and from the article, I drew the conclusion that the basic rule to avoid collusion has to be not allowing players from the same team at the same table. On top of that, I decided that if the team can transfer chips between the different seats, and if they also would be allowed to change players in those seats, the format would offer some more strategic and tactical dimensions to the game. Hence, I was hooked on the idea.
"I then called my business partner immediately and told him about the idea, but inasmuch as we had several other projects going on then, we just put it in the big box of ideas that we had. And there it stayed until last summer, when I won a seat in a televised tournament in London, and realized that my format would suit TV and change poker into more of a sport, and therefore attract sponsors. So, when I got home, I spent about two days putting the concept into clear writing, and added some additional features, like the timeouts at the master table. I then called Ola Brandborn, who has run poker tournaments in Sweden since the mid '90s, and told him about the idea over dinner."
"When I first met Carl Stefan, I thought he was a complete lunatic," Brandborn stated. "The idea of team members being able to switch seats with and transfer chips among each other during the breaks was so completely against traditional poker that it took some time getting used to. But by the time we reached dessert, I was deeply fond of the idea, and even added some of my own touches to the concept, and we decided to try it out in a real club tournament. So, we invited some of the clubs for a small trial tour with 12 teams of four members each, and interviewed the players afterward. All except one said they had a blast and really liked the concept."
"After the initial trial tournament, I applied for a patent for the concept," said Gustavsson, "and by then we even have two separate team tournament leagues here in Sweden. What we have done is extract a lot from our patent into a set of rules that could be used for playing team poker tournaments. These rules regulate more or less everything that can take place in a team tournament. From those rules, we have put together a structure that we think works very well right now. The structure is about how team action is handled, chip transfers, how the master table is created, and, of course, the collusion rule that states that a team can never have more than one player in play at each table. "The master table is created in much the same manner as a final table is created. In our leagues and in the Nordic Masters at Casino Cosmopol, the master table is created when there are eight teams left in the tournament. However, some teams could at that point have more than one seat left, and inasmuch as they all can't sit down at the master table, they continue play at the side tables.
"There have been times when a team has had all of its seats still intact when at the master table. This is a big advantage, because if a player at the master table goes broke, the team simply takes a player from one of the side tables to sit at the master table and keep playing. This obviously gives the team with more seats left a great advantage, as they can take more risks at the master table and know that they still get a second or even third chance."
"As of right now, we are planning for a European Team Masters in this format, and are currently discussing it with potential sponsors and trying to find the right casino to host the tournament. And we are also in the middle of the process of taking it online," Gustavsson concluded. 
