'Should I stay or should I go?'
The British seem to like to travel, and poker players are no exception. Complaints about being on the road away from friends and family, building up low-cost carriers' profits, and living out of a suitcase are common among the regular circuit followers, but follow they do, nonetheless. The £5 Easyjet flight departing at some ungodly hour on the day of an
EPT event is more than likely to be sprinkled with players, and there's always a chance you'll get to hear a couple of hours' worth of bad-beat stories while waiting to arrive in Dublin, Copenhagen, and so on.
There are, of course, other incentives than cards for leaving town on a poker-related holiday. Take the
Caribbean Poker Classic, for example. Although it clashed with our local festival in Walsall, and the superb new
Green Joker Poker festival in Drogheda, Ireland, a sizeable handful decided that the prospect of some weather that wasn't unremittingly bleak and cold was too tempting to pass by. Just the cartoon of a palm tree on the website was enough to get them pulling down the suitcases, kissing the kids goodbye, and buying a more long-haul flight, ready-qualified on Cryptologic or not.
Having arrived, the UK players made a pretty good show for themselves, with 10 making the money in the $6,000 main event, while Scots made up a third of the final table. Another Scottish player, Michelle Conaghan, took the top spot in the $300 side event, with an additional nine out of 18 money finishers coming from the United Kingdom. The similar tournament earlier in the week was won by an aggressive, young player, James Akenhead (who can drive trains, apparently, although poker looks to be a more lucrative occupation for him), while Irish second-place finisher Tony Cascarino went on to win the following $1,000 freezeout. I can imagine that all of the equally successful Danes and Swedes were as pleased to have escaped their respective winters. And although there's something strange about flying halfway around the world to play with a lot of the same people who are in your local cash game every week, I'm sure the school-trip atmosphere (as it were) made it enjoyable.
There's a new tour on the way, however, that might keep a lot of UK players on home soil. The
Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, starting in January, will bring a series of £1,000 events to 10 Grosvenor casinos, with a £3,000 grand final at the beginning of 2008. Inasmuch as many of these casinos have been working hard to upgrade or kick-start their cardrooms, with a festival almost every week somewhere on this poker-saturated island, it seems a natural progression to combine these main events into a tour, with a couple of extra incentives. One is the added money: £10,000 is being added to each leg of the tour, with £50,000 thrown in to the final. Another is the (inevitable) introduction of televised tables; under the auspices of Sunset & Vine, 22 one-hour shows on
Channel 4 are planned for the latter half of 2007. Plus, who can resist the challenge of a leader board - with cash prizes for those who perform best overall throughout the tour.
Linked to sister company Blue Square Poker, the
UK Tour has satellite qualification well in hand, too, and one of the aims of promoting this link is, in the words of Martin Belsham, M.D. of said company, "to give people an opportunity to cross the threshold from playing poker online to playing live at high-profile tournaments throughout the UK." £1,000 is, after all, around €1,400 or $1,970 or so at the moment, so these tournaments aren't small potatoes to potential visitors or regular lower-limit online players. Capacity is said to be 200 for the three-day events, and 400 for the four-day events. With the inexplicable desire of most players to appear on TV "at least once," I reckon it will be popular. Not since
Late Night Poker, that groundbreaking series that introduced a large number of British potential players to the delights of the holecard camera, has a UK tour been given a TV spot on a channel that's available to everyone with a television of the most basic sort.
More interesting from a player's perspective is the real possibility of a standard set of rules and regulations being set among Grosvenors. It has in the past been under the jurisdiction of individual cardroom managers to adjudicate in arguments, lay down the law regarding tricky rulings, and adapt and even alter things, like the blinds structure of events, as they saw fit. Perhaps with the same tournament director overseeing the whole tour, a level of consistency could finally be achieved, which could well filter down to all tournaments in the British Isles. That would be a great benefit for players, who are often so sure that their "third-card-from-the-bottom" misdeal rule, or their underraise criteria, for example, is the correct course of action that they hold up tournaments arguing with the management. And it would be great to see ninehanded final tables across the board. Having in the past suggested that the growth of live poker at the higher end of the buy-in scale here might not be sustainable, the new tour might both rekindle interest in it and provide a no-nonsense platform for the live game to continue to attract new players.
Jen Mason is part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.
