In May 2013, the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Tampa made an announcement that instantly turned heads in the poker world: The Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open main event was going to be a $5,300 buy-in event the following August, with a guaranteed $10 million prize pool. It was bold, and the fact that it was being attempted without the affiliation of any of the major poker tours was unheard of. Chatter in the industry instantly turned to the overlay; not if there would be one -- that was a foregone conclusion -- but just how big it was going to be. Then the players showed up in droves.
The re-entry event finished with 2,384 players, pushing the prize pool to $11,920,000. It was a major victory for the booming Seminole property and a strong sign that poker, which had previously been reported to be dying, was doing just fine.
Nobody was surprised when they announced the event would return for 2014, and nobody expected an overlay of any kind. Then the players didn't show. Only a 37 percent decrease in entries from 2013 (1,499), meant a $2.5 million overlay. That was money coming straight out of the casino's coffers and essentially the worst-case scenario for the event's organizers.
So what happened?
The issue most players are pointing to is scheduling. The main event was pushed ahead one week from the previous year, but there were other events that should've raised a few red flags. The European Poker Tour stop in Barcelona, which last year came after the SHRPO, was now running the week before. The WinStar Casino in Oklahoma, with a $2.5 million guarantee, was running at the same time (their same dates as 2013). The WPT Legends of Poker event in Los Angeles was scheduled around the same time as well, and these four conflicts exposed the oversaturation of the poker market. Players who were able to travel were faced with a decision and inevitably ended up spread out all over the world.
There's a more important issue though, one that isn't getting as much of the blame for the shortfall as it should. Over the last few years, the re-entry tournament format, which allows players to buy back into a tournament after busting out, has gained popularity. It's great for creating ridiculously large prize pools, but it puts recreational players at a massive disadvantage. At the 2013 SHRPO, Phil Ivey entered seven times. Other pros, those with the bankroll or the backer to do so, fired multiple bullets in an attempt to win their share of that nearly $12 million. Local players, the ones who have turned Florida into a booming poker economy, and satellite qualifiers, were left hoping their one shot, their one $5,300 buy-in, would be enough.
Asking an amateur player, playing potentially the biggest buy-in event he's ever been in, to go up against a 2,400 person field is daunting enough, but when seven of those players are Phil Ivey, the aspirations he had of winning big quickly evaporate. While the rest of the poker industry talks about the need for big buy-in poker tournaments to work together to avoid scheduling conflicts -- an important step for sure -- there should be some real discussion to the viability of unlimited re-entry events. The amateurs, the players with regular 9-5 jobs that head down to their local casino to grind out a small profit at the $1/$2 or $2/$5 games, might have looked at the way the professional players used the re-entry format to their advantage last year and decided they'd find somewhere else to take their shot.
In the short term, re-entry events are great at putting record-setting events on the calendar, but the long term impact on the poker economy isn't all that great. For that economy to be stable and flourish, poker rooms and tours need to ensure they're doing their best to cater to the recreational crowd. For proof of that concept you need to look no further than the tremendous success that the Heartland Poker Tour and WPT DeepStacks (formerly the DeepStacks Poker Tour) have enjoyed the last five years. Sure, if you look at the results you see that pros have had some big scores on those tours, but the events are seeing growth and the tours are continuing to expand thanks to their ability to put together an experience, including TV coverage, which amateur players enjoy and feel like they're being given equal opportunity to compete.
For their part, the Seminole Hard Rock is giving no indication that it is going to scale back on its aggressive approach to poker tournaments. It has a number of big events scheduled and a lot of smart people in the industry don't believe it will lower the guarantee next August when it hosts the SHRPO again. The players who make their living traveling the tournament circuit are probably excited about the possibility of another $10 million guarantee. That outlook is probably shortsighted though. The small uptick that is likely next year is probably going to be due to more tournament pros chasing an overlay. The amateurs, the lifeblood of tournament poker, have little motivation to come storming back to the event so long as it allows the pros an even more pronounced advantage over them. That's just not good for the game.