Hi everyone - I was on vacation last week but in case you haven't noticed, full structures have been posted for each event including all of the rules details that are so important for travelling players.

As well, we have arranged for rates with two hotels - the details are posted on the festival mini-site: http://www.playgroundpoker.ca/springclassic2015 under the Hotels tab.

Summary: there's the Westin at $182/night, located at 270 St-Antoine W, and the Residence Inn Marriott at the Western edge of downtown (and particularly convenient to the highway to drive here) for $109.

OH - and there's this - the new felts are being installed...

Nice, eh! There are busloads coming from Oshawa, North Bay, etc. I can't find anybody to carpool with (along Highway 403/401) for the Mega Overlay Satellite, but I plan to carpool there by the Survivor Event #8 on April 29. If the final table will be live streamed on Twitch, I plan to stay there until the final day of May 6, before flying to WPT Amsterdam on May 7.

Just like during WPT Montreal, the police was again called to Rustik Motel during the Winter Festival this month, so my roommate is looking to stay somewhere else during the WPT CSC.

Hey everyone - just wanted to check in and let people know that all of our pre-event info is now published including a pretty comprehensive FAQ that should help with a lot of questions players may have.

There's one notable addition to past versions of this document:
There's nothing new to Playground with this policy, but it does surprise some players from time to time so it made the list.

Hey everyone,

Event 1 is rolling along and so far there have been 843 entries in the 3 of 4 starting flights that have run. This afternoon we ran our first in-festival satellite for the Main, which is awarding 2 seats, with more to come during the next two weeks.

We have an all-new design for the Event Blog and I'm hoping to do some experimentation with Twitter Periscope live streaming video - be sure to follow us on Twitter @PlaygroundPoker to get the news of this.

Here's the link to the event blog: http://events.playgroundpoker.ca/springclassic2015/

Do your events employ best stack forward?

Event #1 (The Wild $150), Event #3 (The $250 Frenzy) and the WPT Canadian Spring Championship are all next-day re-entry events in which players who qualify twice or more must only continue on Day 2 with their largest stack. Event #3 has 6 starting flights (14 levels of 30 mins each) and the WPT this time has 2 starting flights.

Short answer: yes.

All other events are freezeout events.

I look forward to the final table being live streamed on Twitch. When do you plan your next Periscope stream?

So as far as Twitch is concerned - that's not really in my hands - the WPT Live Events crew plans all of the streaming and other broadcasting.

Please help me out though - I'm aware of Twitch and have tuned into broadcasts going back to Jason Somerville's first ones so I'm not really a newbie... but for a live event, like this one, what do you see as the advantage over, say, just streaming via YouTube as usual? Is it the interactivity of the built-in chat (similar to Justin.tv back in the day)?

I tried to do a Periscope broadcast today but it turns out I didn't have enough bandwidth available over WiFi to initialize a stream. I'm going to work on fine-tuning that tomorrow and we'll see.

For Periscope, the things I see as interesting are:

a) TD announcements and "shuffle up and deal" (OK not that interesting, but a decent video "hit")

b) If you're Johnny-on-the-spot, covering a big all-in hand. Tough to be in the right place at the right time for this, and not to hold up the action.

c) Short player interviews at breaks or prior to starting.

d) Short player interviews at the end after bagging.

Any other things you (Nash, but please, anyone can answer) would like to see? I'm extremely open to moving quickly in this direction. Provided I can get the technical details solved.

As long as Playground has enough bandwidth, the WPT Twitch will be popular like the last one at Rolling Thunder. Hopefully today's $5 million Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown TV final table will also be on Twitch, including Canadian Ryan Rivers, who won $165K at Playground's Canada Cup.

As I advised a poker site recently, Twitch is very important for online poker. While YouTube is dominant in recorded video sharing, Twitch is #1 in gaming live streams that Google/Youtube tried to buy it. The best Twitch streamers do a lot of interaction with their viewers, whether it be Liv Boeree standing up as I requested to show her bare midriff or Daniel Negreanu taking his laptop around his house to show his trophies, GOT, peeing, etc.

Playground can learn from WPT's Twitch of the CSC final table for possible live streams of its own future final tables, e.g., chatters will go wild over the final table desperately negotiating for a ten-way chop!

I have Periscope on my iPad Air, but I don't understand how live streams that quickly gets deleted is useful for poker viewers. All I see on Periscope links are "Ended minutes ago" or "Broadcast not found."

I won a seat in a PG satellite and am finally unable to go. I am letting it go for $3350. Transaction has to be done directly at the Playground cage for our mutual security. IM from montreal so flexible on the meetup date.

PM me if interested.

Thanks

I called residence inn and they want $149 before tax, so you should probably take that off your site.

My previous roommate probably can't go this time, but I went ahead and booked starting Wednesday. In case somebody wants to go from Toronto in time for the Wednesday evening tournaments, I'll be driving from QEW then Highway 401.

Does anybody know what exactly happened? Was it Eric Afriat playing a hand with his friend?

Nice job on main event payout. Much smoother and less top heavy than other recent wpts.

The situation was blown out of proportion.
Afriat folded twice to the same guy (sitting to his immediate left), after having placed a bet pre-flop, with the guy going all-in over the top.
Afriat was getting roughly 3.5x his money to make the call, but opted to fold.

It should not be considered soft play, rather simply him getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Eric likes to play a lot of hands, perhaps he thought he'd be better off folding the hand (for future value) than opening up something like Q-6 for the table to see.

The good news is that the partypoker-sponsored WPT Montreal festival will return on November 1 – 19, 2015.
While the $3,500 WPT CSC (3,104 + 96 + 300) had a lower rake than the smaller buy-in events, the $3,800 WPT Montreal will be back to a rake of 12% (3395 + 105 + 350).