- The unlimited re-entry, €300 buy-in, at-home portion of the online tournament will start in less than a month.
- Day 1 events will start between February 3 and May 19, depending on where a player lives.
- Players can also skip the at-home grind and jump directly to Day 2 on June 1, with a €3k buy-in at Wembley.
- International, French, Spanish, Italian and US-facing online sites will run the day 1 events.
An updated schedule of the International Stadiums Poker Tour revealed yet another alteration to the event.
Instead of starting inside London’s Wembley Stadium, players who participate in a series of Day 1 events will start at home sometime between February 3 and May 19, depending on where they live.
The original plan was for all players to assemble with their laptops in the stadium from May 31 to a live event June 6.
For months, questions swirled about the prize pool and whether organizers could actually pull off such a massive gathering.
Initially, they promised a $30m guaranteed prize pool. Then that figured dropped to $20m. In August, one ISPT representative even told pokerfuse that “the event basically centers around this fact.”
Later that month, they signed Sam Trickett to join Michael Mizrachi as an ambassador for the event, along with David Benyamine and Liz Lieu.
And for the next week or so, the plan seemed to be coming together nicely.
But in early September, organizers either forgot about or abandoned a press conference to explain the payout structure. Then the tournament site replaced $20m “guarantee” with $20m “expected.”
Later that month, Georges Djen, another organizer, told PokerStrategy that the tournament would be canceled unless 15,000 players participated, only to backtrack a few days later and say the comment was misunderstood in translation. He apparently meant that a field of 15,000 to 17,000 would be “financially interesting.”
Now any financial figure related to the prize pool has been scraped from ispt.com. Instead, the FAQ section states that the prize pool “will depend on the final number of participants.”
The site more explicitly answers its own follow-up question: “Is there a guarantee for the prize pool? The Prize Pool is not guaranteed.”
The only concrete statements about payouts is that 8% of all participants would be “in the money,” and 70% of those who play in Wembley would be “paid out.”
And so the latest schedule adjustment to what’s touted on ispt.com as “the biggest tournament ever” prompted staff writer Peter Amsel to call the whole thing a “boondoggle.”
Barring further unexpected adjustments, however, the unlimited re-entry, €300 buy-in, at-home portion of the online tournament will start in less than a month.
ISPT has partnered with large number of online sites to run the day 1 event. Players who can play on dot-com sites have the choice of Poker 770, an iPoker skin, or Lock Poker, which is also open to US players. French players will play on either Partouche.fr and MyPok.fr, both on the same Partouche network. Italian players can play on iPoker’s Netbet.it. Spanish players play on Poker770.es.
The first Day 1 begins February 3 in France, and US players can start February 10 on Lock, while the rest of Europe is eligible to start February 17.
Players can also skip the at-home grind and jump directly to Day 2 on June 1, with a €3k buy-in at Wembley.
For the time being, the side events, including a €10,900 high roller, also remain on the schedule, according to the site.
The next few weeks and months will determine whether ISPT lives up to the hype of “the most innovative poker tournament ever … gathering thousands of players.”