Mark's Page

The Tour Wars
By Mark Napolitano

Just how many poker players are out there who are prepared to come up with $10,000 for one of these main events on yet another tour??
Surely with the World Poker Tour and the WSOP Circuit events overlapping each others schedules, and both offering $10,000 main events, the players must have to decide which tour to back.

So what are the players looking for? A fair deal of course. The players are wanting corporate sponsorships, so they don't have to fund the $10,000 events themselves and allow the tours to reap the rewards of the television deals etc. The Players want those deals too, but they are restricted by 'Logo Wear' or not as the case maybe.

Now we all know that the online poker sites offer amazing promotions to win some of these $10,000 seats to these main events, but how are they going to feel when No Logo's are allowed on the televised shows at all, and there might be a possibility that the sites have to just give the online players the money and hope they show up at the event, however they will not likely be branding one of their T-Shirts or caps etc.

So are the promotions online for these events about to come to an abrupt end? What will happen to the numbers for the live events then? Will they decline or will they continue to grow. Poker players do have huge egos and want to see themselves on the television, but there is surely only so many $10,000 buy-ins they can stand.

Maybe the tours themselves will have to make more seats available via satellites all year around at international venues to compensate the lack of online qualifiers being sent their way.

We have already heard and seen some of the players joining together to boycott some of the events in the hope that the voice of the player can be heard, but standing on the other side of the fence, where would these players be today if it were not for the vision of Steve Lipscombe and Lyle Berman? Would they be earning dollars for a television commercial? Or being stopped in the street for autographs. I don't think so.

Yes I agree that the time is now right for another tour to come along and change the way things are done, as the existing tours are restricted in the television deals that they have and the logo restriction too. If another tour can take the lessons of the existing ones and open it up somehow for corporate sponsorship to come forward and sponsor the players, then I feel that primetime television would be delighted to take a tour sponsored by a household brand and not a dot net or a dot com.

Over the coming months I will be making comparisons between the various tours (and the people behind them) that are currently operating. The facts will show clearly which tour or tours the players are backing and I will try to identify why.

Many would say that the poker players have no right to complain, but why shouldn't they when fellow golf players who dedicate their lives to staying at the top of their profession can command higher dollars from sponsorship deals than they do from winnings from events. The life of a professional poker player is a dedicated one, and one that relies heavily on financial support through good and bad times at the table, so surely it would make sense for those players that are consistently in the top 100 or so to boost their income through sponsorship deals and merchandise branding, just like other sports personalities

So let's take a peak at what has happened over the past 3 months with the 2 tours now going head to head.

Month	World Poker Tour	WSOP Circuit Event
December 2005	Five Diamond World Poker Classic $8,075,250 555 entries ($15,000 buy-in)	Showboat Atlantic City $931,200 96 entries ($10,000 buy-in)
January 2006	Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure $5,647,200 724 entries ($8,000 buy-in)	Grand Casino Tunica $2,289,500 241 entries ($10,000 buy-in)
	World Poker Open $3,171,900 327 entries ($10,000 buy-in)
	Borgata Winter Poker Open $3,695,700 381 entries ($10,000 buy-in)
February 2006	LA Poker Classic $6,676,416 692 entries ($10,000 buy-in)	Harrah's Atlantic City $1,202,800 124 entries ($10,000 buy-in)
	Bay 101 Shooting Star $4,677,300 502 entries ($10,000 buy-in)

Some of the WPT's more exotic locations will not continue to be a part of their tour for season 5, but will these events continue to grow for the online poker sites that sponsor them? The WPT have recently added the Vegas venue of the Mandalay Bay to their schedule, so let's see who will win this battle of the tours, The WPT with the help of the well known casinos, Harrah's utilizing their own huge network of casinos in the USA, or will it be the online poker sites by themselves? I know where my money is........

Be Lucky,
Mark Napolitano