Today at 12pm was the scheduled Day 1B start of the WSOPE €1,100 Turbo. Day 1A started at 4pm Friday, and apparently this start time had some players expected the same start time today. When only 50 players were at the actual start time just a few minutes before the start, Jack Effel changed the start time to 4pm, much to the consternation of PokerCast host Terrence Chan.

http://www.terrencechanpoker.com/201...ess-today.html

Doesn't sound very proffessional. They should have at least comped everyone who had registered. Imo should have kept same time though.

Sounds pretty unprofessional.

Man the WSOPe turnout is pretty sad when you compare it to the WSOP. Where are all the european recs?

Effel is 'effen stupid for scheduling it this way and then rescheduling it on the fly, thus proving my point.

He couldn't have played this hand worse.

I feel bad for the players who woke up to an alarm 4 hours too early and now will be at a huge disadvantage.

I'd boycott the rest of the series. If you let yourself be treated like cattle, then you are cattle.

Was thinking the same when I saw a lot of the turn out numbers.

Woke up to an alarm 4 hours too early? It's a noon start lol

Busy playing in the underground backgammon tournaments?

Big buy-in European poker is dead. For it to flourish there has to be a poker culture, which you can't have with so few poker venues around Europe.

Loses four hours... Boycotts remaining series. Perhaps a bit extreme.

I'm all for sticking it to the man, but this particular situation seems easily understandable why the change was made... Also it's 4 hours.

I think the outrage would be greater by the players who missed the first 4 hours rather than the 50 that showed up.

Some people, particularly poker players even more particularly professionals tend to sleep in, like, really late.

Not a great decision IMO but I understand it. I also understand why people are upset.

Should have thrown a 5-Table Turbo Freeroll for those that know how to read.

It shows how poor the brands image is. EPTs continue to get record breaking numbers meanwhile the WSOPE is getting the same numbers that a random Vegas casinos daily touraments get.

Poker in Europe dying? Didn't the Aviation Club in Paris just go broke?

Poor turnouts should be expected for the foreseeable future for all poker tourneys in Europe. The game is losing interest and there are too many competing tours which dilutes the percentage of recreational players.

All tours are going to suffer and I wouldn't be shocked to see a few quitting or seriously contracting their tour stops. There is no magical recipe that's going to change this reality. The online avenue has done nearly everything possible to destroy the dream of winning a seat on the cheap. Shame on them for putting short term greed ahead of building something for the future.

Also fwiw, even if they wanted to have bigger events theres no room at the casino in berlin anyways.

Every single player is doing this too. Can't blame them for joining up.

You can always unregister and do something else if you don't like it. Only real solution since you can't have half show up late. Obviously, they shouldn't have done 1A and 1B at different times, that's the mistake here.

Yeah there's def too many poker tournament circuits out there.

Start times like this are solely to accommodate recreationals. They can't take a whole day off work on Friday and can play on Saturday afternoon have a spin, get knocked out and still do something on Saturday night.

A braindead TD just treated those recreationals like dirt, presumably because a few "faces" might be inconvenienced.

Is attendance actually down this year compared to previous WSOPEs? My impression was that it was doing fine, and there is no casino in Europe that can handle the attendance that the LV WSOP gets anyway.

It's just so dumb and short sighted to cater to the pros, recreational players are who should drive the industry. The more recs there are the more pros there will be, not the other way around.

They were shut down for violating French law not because poker was "dying" in Europe.

Live poker appears to be alive and well in Barcelona.

huh ??

Yup. I played a cash game at a casino in Barcelona last summer and the standard of play was much worse than play money on stars.

@zenforest You can't just pay $30 and play against a bunch of amateurs to satellite into a live event anymore like Chris Moneymaker.

The lowest PCA main event satellite scheduled is a $320 hyper (or $700 if you are looking for something more comparable to the actual structure you are qualifying for). There is also $215 rebuy / add-on.

The lower buy-in satellites are just used to funnel fish to be eaten by sharks at the top level of the satellite pyramid structure. It is also possible for pros to "grind" the satellites winning several packages and getting cash (or T$ ?) instead.

They probably rake plenty off the satellite structure but the downside is they end up having to pretend in the TV coverage that people like Tom Hall are legit underdogs because they don't have anyone there who really corresponds to their depositor base.

After they announced Berlin as their 2015 location, I spoke to a couple people about that choice. Nobody thought that was a good decision unless their priorities are something totally diferent than high attendance numbers.

Not really an option if you have paid for flights/hotels already, unless you decide to do tourist stuff for a week and maybe play a 48 session at Berghain..

Smart enough to know they are dead money I would think. Also it's October, so they'll all be working rather than the summer WSOP/EPT Barca period.