Tournament Trail — Littered With the Dead and Dying?

At the time of writing, four major European tournaments have just ended — Grosvenor UK Poker Tour Cardiff, World Poker Tour Slovakia, European Poker Tour Barcelona, and World Poker Tour Cyprus.

Numbers at each event will have disappointed the organisers. The last time the GUKPT pulled into Cardiff in 2007 it attracted 315 players. This time it managed only 120. While the WPT Slovakia event is new, it now has the dubious honour of being the least well attended WPT event ever — 100 players compared to season one’s 134 player-low at the Legends of Poker event.

EPT Barcelona was down from 619 players in 2008 to 478 and WPT Cyprus attracted 181 players.

Live poker has enjoyed a spectacular boom in recent years as online poker sites got involved and provided many players to bolster prize pools but as Ryan Lucchesi’s article in this issue of Card Player identifies, things have already started to change in the U.S.

Could European live poker be facing a similar decline?

Long gone are the days when tournament operators would speak to each other to avoid clashing large and popular festivals. With so many new operators jostling for space in the live poker arena, even the big boys are facing a tougher sell for their once prestigious events.

The recent sale of the WPT brand to PartyGaming for a figure of just over $12 million seems to confirm that these big brand tours may no longer hold the allure they once did, and with new destination tours such as the European Masters of Poker and Unibet Open gathering momentum, both sponsors and players are facing tough choices.

Perhaps with the relative decline in player sponsorship, televised tournaments no longer have the same cachet for some in the game, and possibly players are now more interested in playing a network-run tournament or festival which guarantees plenty of online players not possessing a great deal of live experience.

Whatever the reasons, player choice has never been better, and smaller but more frequently paid out prize pools are likely to become more prevalent as the live game landscape experiences considerable change in Europe this coming season.

Europeans Storm Macau and Kiev
It’s been a great start to the new poker season for European players. Congratulations to Dermot Blaine from Ireland, Adrien Allain from France, and Maxim Lykov from Russia, for taking down the main events at the Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau, Asian Poker Tour Macau, and European Poker Tour Kiev respectively.

By the time you read this we’ll have had the World Series of Poker Europe, European Poker Tour London, Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge, and Full Tilt Million Dollar Cash Game over a three week period in London.

Here’s hoping the money stays on this side of the Atlantic ocean!