- 177 players turn up to compete in the inaugural live tournament, which has three tiers of entry and three separate prize pools.
- Brian Sheppard won the tournament, taking home just over £3000.
- Roberto Romanello, the format’s creator, came in second.
The UK’s Dusk Till Dawn Casino based in Nottingham introduced a new live tournament format, MultiPrizePool Poker (MPP™) on Jan 10. The format allows entries at three buy-in levels for a single tournament, enabling players with smaller budgets to compete in bigger buy-in tournaments.
The format is simple: There are three buy-in levels, £25+6, £50+8 and £100+10, and three prize pools. The first prize pool consists of the first £25 of each buy-in, so it’s the number of entries multiplied by £25; the second prize pool is made up of the next £25 paid by all players who buy in at the £50 and £100 levels; the final prize pool is the remaining £50 of the players paid £100.
Effectively, players at the top level have invested £25 into prize pool 1, £25 into prize pool 2 and £50 into prize pool 3.
The prize distribution is independent for each prize pool. The top finishing player in the £100 buy-in prize pool will win first place in that prize pool, and the same goes for the £50 buy-in level. Since all players are entered in the level 1 pool, the tournament winner will also be the winner of the £25 prize pool.
The first MPP tournament attracted a field of 177 entries. The tiered structure paid out nine places at the highest level, 14 at the £50 level and 24 places at the minimum £25 level.
Brian Sheppard bought in at the top level and won the tournament, so took 1st place money for all three levels—£1,190 + £824 + £1,024—for a total take home of just over £3k.
The format was created by former Full Tilt Red Pro Roberto Romanello who has over $2.7m in tournament winnings. The Welsh born player tops the all time money list for Wales and has won the EPT Prague event in 2010 and the 2011 WPT event in Bratislava.
In this inaugural MPP event, Romanello bought in for the maximum and came very close to winning the whole event. After six and a half hours of play, Sheppard won the final table, pushing Roberto into second place.
The Dusk Till Dawn Casino describes itself as the “largest and only poker-dedicated venue in the UK.” It hosts 45 tables with the seating capacity of 450 players. The new MPP tournaments will be scheduled for every Thursday night at 7pm. Dusk Till Dawn also operates an online poker room on the International (Boss Media) Network.
The advantages of this format for online play make it an attractive option for the major internet poker networks. Apart from the opportunity it provides to compete against higher stakes players—which should attract recreational players—it increases the effective prize pool so guarantees can be higher. Perhaps most significantly it makes the most of limited liquidity on smaller networks, or where regulations limit the player pool as in France, Spain and Italy.