The death of the $10k and $25k poker tournament Part 1

Considering the abysmal turnout at the season-ending World Poker Tour $25k Championship it appears tournament poker has a major problem, and that problem is with $10k and $25k buy-in events. This has been a recurring issue since the 2012 running of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (considered one of the Top 5 most prestigious tournaments in poker) saw its attendance plummet some 30%, and virtually every other $10k event has followed suit:

• The Aussie Millions Main Event went from 721 entrants to 659 from 2011 to 2012
• The WPT World Poker Finals Main Event went from 242 entrants to 189 from 2011 to 2012
• The WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic went from 438 entrants to 413 from 2011 to 2012
• The WPT LA Poker Classic Main Event went from 681 entrants to 549 from 2011 to 2012
• The WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Main Event went from 415 entrants to 364 from 2011 to 2012
• The EPT Grand Final Main Event 686 entrants to 665 from 2011 to 2012 (despite moving from Madrid back to the more amenable Monte Carlo)

And 2011 was by no means a high-water mark for these events, which routinely awarded million dollar first-place prizes (sometimes multi-million prizes) during the heyday of the poker boom in the mid to late 2000’s. In order to buck the trend many tournaments have been lowering their buy-ins over the years, some to $5,000 and some like the Borgata Poker Open going even lower, to $3,300. The Grand Prix de Paris, a staple on the WPT for ten years lowered its entry fee from €10,000 to €7,500, and the Five Diamonds went from $15,000 to $10,000.

So what’s the deal? What is going on in poker that is killing off these events?

The answer is not simply one specific issue, but a whole host of things that have come together to make tournaments in this buy-in range lose their appeal:

Competing Tournaments

In the mid 2000’s if you wanted to play in a major tournament series you needed to find where the WPT was that month. But the World Poker Tour isn’t the only game in town anymore, and even the European Poker Tour now has some competition. Rarely does a week go by without multiple events from the WPT, EPT, WSOPC, HPT, ANZPT, APT, LAPT, UKIPT, and more taking place. The tournament world is basically being continually fractured, and unless there is some major consolidation this trend will likely continue.

Online Tournaments

The rise of online tournament series has put a sever crimp in live tournaments, since the expenses are almost non-existent compared to flying to a tournament, booking a hotel for upwards of a week, and everything else that goes into playing on the tournament trail.

With online tournament series like the PokerStars WCOOP and SCOOP, and even the newer series like iPoker’s iPOPS and the Merge Gaming Network’s Poker Maximus, offering six and seven-million dollar paydays for a fraction of the buy-in that live events cost, a lot of poker players are simply skipping live events in lieu of online tournaments.

Even weekly tournaments like the Sunday Million offer $150k first-place prizes for a mere $215 buy-in.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I will discuss even more reasons why these tournaments are on the decline.