Quote:
Originally Posted by Stew
There wasn't money added to the prize pool, they just fell short of the number of entrants to cover the 50K guarantee. Today's event (Saturday, $220 buy-in, 20K guaranteed) had 169 runners, I believe, for a prize pool around 33K.
One thing a lot of folks commented on was that the 50K guarantee for event 1 was not mentioned on the flyers that are mailed out and the only way a lot of people know of the events and information is via the flyers that are mailed out....
I really don't feel bad for you Horseshoe.....Hollywood had a 2 day deep stack in March that costs $345 to enter and has a 250K guarantee with Days 1 and 2 on Thursdays and Fridays and they pulled over 1800 entrants. Granted, that tourney allowed re-entry on each day as well, but still only about 10% typically re-enter. For them to get over 1500 entrants and yours to pull a tad shy over 200 is ridiculous when you're buy-in is $200 and theirs was $345 in similar markets (Cincy and Louisville close in size, similar proximty to Indy, Lexington.....sure Hollywood is fairly close to Columbus, but Horseshoe isn't that far from Nashville or St. Louis).
We actually added nearly $13,000 to the Prize Pool to account for the $50,000 guarantee. I agree that we should have had way more players than we did, and posiibly it was because it was not mentioned in the flyers. I have been scratching my head for 4 days now trying to figure out why the turnout was so low. We offered the same event last month with less advertising and no guarantee and drew 187 players on Thursday and had over 200 registered when we forced to shut down on Friday. Perhaps it is becasue of the 2 recent shutdowns that people stayed away this time.
Hollywood runs a great tournament with their deepstack events and they have drawn spectacular crowds for all of these events, but they are also running these during their WPT events and that is a huge draw. We draw similar fields during our WSOP events because it is the cheapest opportunity for many players to be a part of thsi excitement.
Nobody is asking you to feel sorry for us, we took a chance with the guaranteed prize pool and it didn't work out this time. We will make some changes and try again. While both staffs at Hollywood and Horseshoe would love to have all of the business, it ultimately comes down to making sure that we offer the best experience for Poker players at either location. With the shutdown of online poker, we are seeing a lot of fresh faces in our casino for the first time and we will do whatever it takes to make trhese players enjoy their time at the tables.
If anyone has any suggestions on what we can do to make these experiences better, i am all ears and would love to hear your suggestions. Thanks