EPT San Remo suffers from Black Friday fallout

In 2009 the PokerStars.net European Poker Tour San Remo tournament became one of the crown jewels of the tournament series when it jumped from the 701 players that entered the event the previous year all the way to 1,178. The following year the San Remo stop on the EPT was once again one of the most well attended, this time bringing in 1,240 entrants. However, this year’s tournament saw a dramatic drop in attendance, the reason for which must be put squarely on the fallout from Black Friday.

The poker world was unsure how the US government crackdown on April 15, 2011 would affect the live poker tournaments, with many figuring that most of the damage would be done to tournaments held in the United States, but with the first numbers in for a major tournament post-Black Friday it appears the damage done to the poker world is even more widespread than was at first imagined.

This year’s San Remo Main Event drew a solid, but unimpressive 987 players, a 20% decline from last year’s attendance totals. And it would be hard to put the attendance drop on concurrently running events even though the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, in addition to the World Series of Poker Circuit Series at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas both being underway. In a similar scenario in early April -where the EPT Berlin was competing virtually head-to-head with the NAPT Mohegan Sun, the WPT Indiana, and a WSOP Circuit event in St Louis, it was the EPT tournament that was able to maintain its attendance numbers the best, while the NAPT and WPT saw dramatic declines in attendance.

One of the main issues affecting the EPT San Remo attendance was likely that many online Poker Pros still have a majority of their bankroll locked-up at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and/or Absolute Poker and are simply unwilling to travel to major tournaments around the world until they know that money will be returned to them 100%. Unfortunately the WPT tournament in Florida is the tour’s first stop at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino, and while attendance was solid at just over 400 players, we have no previous data to base the attendance numbers on.

With the World Poker Tour Championship coming up in May, not to mention the World Series of Poker, we will soon have an even better idea of how widespread the damage will be from the loss of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the Cereus Poker Network in the US market.