Poker Forum

ISPT is a great concept with one fundamental flaw ... the person that is running it wants a huge success, right away, and of course no hard work, no time delays, & no inconvenient "earning its place" in the current poker boom. There is no initial investment that permits "trail runs" with firm guarantees in small stadiums to test equipment and in fact no iPads were bought when it was announced. These trial runs would have served five positive purposes: (1) You get to fix bugs and see if the idea holds water on a smaller scale, (2) You get to announce winners in - say - five different places, (3) You have five amazing publicity opportunities to pump the big event downstream, (4) You build a stable collection of people that have already played in this stadium format for customer research purposes, & (5) You show the poker world you are serious because small trial events send a message that you are in for the long haul.

These "changes after consulting with the players" sound crazy because they are using pro players as sounding boards when in fact the right sounding board is the average player. A great format and playing structure to Gus Hansen will likely be different from what Mrs. Simpson amateur poker player from Foggy-on-Avon, England absolutely needs to go. Great poker players want large prizes? They are the ones that should adapt to the format of amateurs because amateurs are the ones making up the prize dollars.

Ever since it was announced I have been beating the drum asking where the satellites online are. No answer to emails eventually we learn it is exclusively on a site 770Poker. Good for 770Poker to get an exclusive but short-sighted from both the point of view of 770Poker and the ISPT organizers. 770Poker should *insist* on more online sites doing satellites because "the more the merrier" is trumped by the fact that this event is *ONLY* a success is there are a *LOT* of entries. Fact: 770Poker is a great site but there is no way it can generate "a LOT" of entries.

Bottom line: Get to work ISPT, stop trying to be elitist and exclusive ... you are *ONLY* a success if there are a *LOT* of people in the event and yes ... you are going to have to work hard to get them.