The organizers of the International Stadiums Poker Tour (ISPT) had the lofty goal of creating one of the most impressive poker spectacles the world has ever seen. It is starting to look like it might just be a spectacle. Already having reconfigured the tournament because interest has proven to be much lower than what was anticipated, tournament organizers had to make the embarrassing decision to cancel the first ISPT satellite due to poor turnout.
The ISPT was originally designed to be a gigantic poker tournament held at the venerable European football venue, Wembley Stadium. 30,000 players were expected to compete in the then €6,000 buy-in event, all playing on laptops from seats inside the stadium. On the tournament’s third day, the final 3,000 players were to then move down to play live at tables setup on the pitch. One re-buy and one double add-on were permitted as players jockeyed for their share of an expected €20,000,000 prize pool (once €30,000,000 guaranteed, then €20,000,000 guaranteed, but then changed to “expected”).
That format was eventually changed. Day 1 is to now take place online at several associated internet poker rooms. Players who finish in the top ten percent of each of the six starting flights advance to Day 2 at Wembley Stadium. All players who advance from the Day 1 qualifiers will begin Day 2 with their ending starting stack from Day 1. The Day 1 qualifiers cost €300 to enter and each player begins with 5,000 chips.
Those who do not qualify from the Day 1’s or simply wish to skip them can still buy-in to Day 2 directly for €3,000 and start with 50,000 chips.
On the surface, that format sounds manageable. One problem, though. Nobody showed up for Day 1A, held at Lock Poker on Sunday. Correction: only two players registered for the tournament. As a result, Lock Poker postponed the qualifier until February 17. Of course, Lock Poker did not admit that the postponement was because the tournament did not meet its minimum enrollment, but rather because of “technical issues.”
Note: As the last sentence was being written, Lock Poker tweeted that it will hold a freeroll on Saturday which will award 25 tickets into the rescheduled ISPT Day 1A tournament.
Poker770, another online poker room hosting starting flights for the ISPT, has also had problems drumming up interest. It has cancelled multiple satellites – costing just €2.20 for a re-buy tourney or €11 for a freezeout – into its Day 1 tournaments.
A total of 13 players have qualified for Day 2 of the ISPT at Wembley Stadium to this point, with chip stacks ranging from 107,162 to 13,525. That also brings us to one complaint about the ISPT format: many players who make it through a Day 1 qualifier will start Day 2 with significantly smaller stacks than those players who wait and buy-in directly. It is conceivable that even some of the largest chip stacks in the qualifiers won’t be greater than 50,000 chips if those Day 1’s have very low turnout. At the same time, one could argue that by paying one-tenth the buy-in of someone who skips right to Day 2, someone who qualifies via satellite should understand that they could start Day 2 at a disadvantage.
