Too little too late?

"PokerStars has announced that the return of the European Poker Tour (EPT), Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) and the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT).

These iconic tours all became part of the PokerStars Championship in 2016, however after listening to player feedback they have decided to return to the memorable brands that were so strong on the live circuit.

Confirmed stops for the EPT next year are Sochi, Barcelona, Prague and Monte Carlo."

it was just confusing to me why they'd abandon their own established brand
And I actually assumed they stopped doing tournaments altogether and probably wasnt the only one

are the EPT payout structures comming back?

Couldn't tell you anything that has happened in the past year with the Stars live scene, they lost all brand recognition. It was a crazy, poorly thought out move.

Would also like info on the payout structures.

Nice to see them willing to back track on this.
Damage will be done by the year hiatus but it's not the end of the world.
They should still keep some of the festival stops in lieu of the UKIPT, Eureka, BPS, IPT etc and the 1k euro price point seems right.

The APPT will continue to suffer and with the new satellite policy has no chance of getting anywhere. Either they need to do things radically different or just throw in the towel. The LAPT will suffer as well but not as badly. The EPT should remain strong.

I guess we'll see to what extend 888 and Party will be able to build live event brands. I don't think people will ever feel the same motivation to play EPT events than they have before.

It's actually fairly how efficiently they have shot their reputation. 10% of the people qualifying to Sochi didn't even bother showing up to the event. The new satellite situation will definitely not help, they ****ed up big time with that.

I played a lot of live poker a couple of years ago, played the EPT Berlin schedule twice.. Even if they returned here now I wouldn't wanna go.

The fieldsizes will probably never reach the previous levels. They really blundered this.

at least now we know they werent trying to tank their own tournament series on purpose, they are just incredibly incompetent. I mean, how on earth could anyone think this could be a good idea?

It was gone??

#Amayabe****ingup

Back to 15% and they need way more on line, and live sats (played all over the world, not just at the actual EPT/Pokerstars venue), to all events including the side events.

DTD in Nottingham, England are a good model to copy for this (being very creative with satellites) which is probably the reason why Party Poker teamed up with them for live events partnership, promotion and organisation.

Ditching "EPT", thinking they knew best re: payout structures, focusing too many sats on Spin&Gos, and being complacent about grass roots live tournament poker are/were all contributory to eroding their live brand.

For those wondering about payout structures, id assume if the pokerstars live was less favorable towards regs (more flat pay structures ect..) i'd doubt they would bail on that

they probably just realized that the company put a lot of time/money into building the ept brand ect.. and that it was imo ******ed to get rid of all of the weight that the name carried.

tbh i could be totally wrong though, haven't flicked into a live timbey in years and dont have much of a desire to.

Thanks for posting this, Allen.

In a vacuum, I think the announcement is major news, great for players, great for Stars, and overall a good move.

The problem is the "too little too late" opinion that a lot of veteran players and those who agree with them are going to have. Again in a vacuum, I thought the press release was appropriate and stayed completely away from being negative towards high volume or for-profit players. But it doesn't address the Supernova/SNE "elephant in the room," which imo is the major root cause of ill will towards Amaya/Stars Group.

Also, the media coverage of this "major announcement" seemed to be shot out of a cannon. Several Stars-friendly sites had a story up within minutes and were sharing it liberally on social media until Joey Ingram got on Twitter and reminded his followers why all the hype isn't necessarily justified.

https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/statu...08552166932480

Isaac Haxton hasn't posted on Twitter about it yet, but really I don't know if there's a whole lot to add as Joey pretty much summed it all up nicely in his Tweets.

It's a difficult situation imo b/c major personalities along with forums have earned a far higher level of distribution and trust from both regs & recs than most of the affiliate media sites combined if you don't count Stars' PokerNews network.

Amaya/Stars Group has seriously (some would say maliciously) marginalized a lot of individuals and companies who either work directly for them or have collaborated with them. Pretty much across the board the Stars-friendly "media" coverage mentioned the Amaya/TSG 2015 decision to steal from high volume players only in passing, and defined it along the lines of PR difficulties, making up for poor decisions, reconciling, etc.

That was to be expected of course, but players of all skill levels are becoming much more informed about the industry and continue to flock to content producers who don't have such glaring conflicts of interest when it comes to looking out for players. That's the way I see it at least.

Hopefully all the events will be unlimited re entry for the grinders who got screwed with the SNE debacle.

Hopefully not, two wrongs don't make a right.

But re entries benefit pros with bankrolls ( majority or former SNE's who got screwed )

Unlimited reentry is garbage and will turn off rec players, single re-entry or similar is fine but main events should be freezeouts if advertised as freezeouts.

Amaya jeopardized their effective monopoly with greed and I still want to see them lose market share.

Good move to bring back their tours anyway it was absurd of them to discard the name value they'd built up over a decade or so for no reason.

I haven't been to a stars event since January 2016 so haven't experienced the new version. EPT/PCA pre-Amaya was about as good a series as I can imagine but it went sharply downhill when they tried to turn it into a revenue generator. That and the wide pay-outs make it unattractive whatever they call it.

If the change of name heralds a return to the old approach then that would be positive. I'm not sure it would be enough to overcome the sour taste in my mouth from supporting an event of a company that has done so much to hurt poker.

How much have the field sizes suffered?

As raidalot said the name change of EPT doesn't magically make everything ok as Pokerstars name hasn't changed since it's inception yet the offerings have greatly changed. They will need to revisit all aspects of their live offerings from promotional spend to online/live satellites to whom they do partnerships with and most importantly the player experience at the Live Event.

Where Stars made a very poor choice was not partnering up with places like Playground and DTD. But their biggest mistake of all is not treating Live events as a loss leader. The top brass must understand that it's imperative to lose money on all tours in the hope of obtaining more online players. Without that understanding all Pstars Live events will suffer.

Was looking at stuff over at PokerNews this morning, and didn't see anything about a reversion back to the old structure - but spotted this this announcement. Is this saying that Stars planning on adding bonus tournament packages to certain live and online prize pools in 2018, for a new high roller that will be starting in 2019?

Not sure if that's maybe meant to be an attempt at a compromise to faster play and flattened payouts?


Wonder how come they would go back to Sochi if it wasn't successful last time - wonder if maybe there'd be more interest in tourneys held in the US, like Los Angeles or something? They had that whole new thing going with Kevin Hart, and stuff ...

The high roller (the Players Championship itself) is in Feb 2019, and PS are going to buy approx. 320 players into it throughout 2018 (just about $8m in buyins in total) and also add a million to 1st. These buyins will not be via satellites, but via various promotions, shootouts, raffles, spot-prizes online and live. Over/under on total prizepool?

Just an anecdote. The 1k in prague got 2117 which is bigger than last year I think, though it had 1A, 1B and 1C starting days (not sure about last year). The 5300€ main got 800 something which is very much down from last years nearly 1300 entries. Funnily enough the € paid for first was almost identical.

Excellent.

Last year was the flat 20% payout structure. That only lasted a couple of events. They are back to a more traditional 15% payout.