Wembley Here We Come

The International Stadiums Poker Tour got some good news this month with the coming on board of experienced tournament organisers Dusk Til Dawn and the guaranteeing of a first prize of €1 million.

Day one of the event, of which there are six, is being held online with day two moving to Wembley Stadium, London where players can continue to buy in directly on May 31 and June 1.

The event will need 16,000 day one players in total and 250 direct buy ins to day two to ensure no overlay.

While it’s not as ambitious as was originally conceived it is a definitely more achievable and realistic target now and could offer players a unique “big game” experience that looked unlikely to be come to pass a few months ago.

New Attitudes In New Jersey And New York

With online poker already legalised in Delaware and Nevada, New Jersey has joined the fold of states which have decided to regulate and tax rather than bury and ignore. As this issue of Card Player was going to press the New York senate said in a resolution that it, “supports authorizing and regulating Internet gaming for games of skill, including poker, to reflect recent changes in the classification of these games.”

Meanwhile Massachusetts is inching towards introducing new bricks and mortar casinos and Pennsylvania is also considering online gaming

All of this is great news for U.S. poker players who, for so long now, have been denied the simple freedoms afforded poker players in most of the rest of the civilized world.

Bad Publicity

While it’s often said there’s no such thing as bad publicity there is certainly such a thing as a poor press release. While it’s a first world problem for us sometimes beleaguered journalists there really is no excuse for some of the sloppy, half-formed, poorly executed missives that pass for press releases from some of the world’s leading gaming operators. While I won’t name names to save the companies involved their blushes the level of care taken by companies engaging with the press seems to be at its lowest point in the seven years I’ve been reading and writing online poker press releases. Even worse than inconsistent, irrelevant and insipid press releases are no press releases at all and at least two major poker tour operators don’t seem to see any value in letting journalists’ know who has won their tournaments. And I’m not simply trying to hustle for business as both have in-house PR departments whose job it is to position this information in front of eager press men. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” If any company out there needs to know how their PR efforts rates against their competitors they only have to ask and they’ll get an honest answer! ♠