In three years the European Poker Tour has established itself as a major force in poker. Rick Dacey charts its rapid ascent
When Gavin Griffin lifted the European Poker Tour Grand Final trophy amid fireworks in Monte Carlo this past April it wasn’t just the 25-year-old American who was celebrating his €1.825m victory. With the largest prize pool ever outside America, the biggest field for a European event and the world class nature of the field, poker players, organisers and casinos across Europe were celebrating, too. It was the moment European poker came of age: confirmation that the EPT is more than deserving of its place alongside US big boys, the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker.
The Season 3 EPT finale saw a then European record-breaking 706 runners buy or satellite their way into the €10,000 event creating a €6,636,400 prize pool – the biggest outside America. Over three-and-a-half times as many runners competed in this year’s final as the Season 1 finale two years ago and the field was a veritable who’s who of the poker world. The likes of Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, Barry Greenstein and co. all deemed the event important enough to fly across the pond to do battle with the best Europe has to offer in the forms of Andy Black, Roland de Wolfe, Ram Vaswani and, naturally, the aggressive Scandinavian masses.
The man with the plan
The EPT’s success has directly mirrored the growth of poker in Europe but its prosperity as a high concept tour lies entirely at the feet of poker player and TV director John Duthie, even if he’d be the last person to make the claim. Duthie is well liked on the international poker scene and hugely respected as a player in his own right with $1,769,226 in tournament winnings to his name, £1m of which came from his victory in the first Poker Million back in 2000, which was the largest prize in poker history at the time.
Duthie has a classically British air about him and an equally dry sense of humour to match. It’s easy to see why he handles himself well at the poker table and pulling the strings in the world of small screen production. Duthie’s original calling as a TV director saw him working behind the camera on award winning programmes such as Burn It (2003), As If (2001) and Clocking Off (2000). That leadership experience has paid dividends, with Duthie confident enough to transfer his leadership skills to the world of poker and call the shots as creator of the EPT.
Euro vision
It was during the traditionally slow January period of TV’s production land that Duthie had his moment of inspiration. ‘I was just lying in the bath trying to work out what to do. You tend to look ahead and see what you’re going to do for the year and I suddenly thought I’ll put a European poker tour together,’ explains Duthie, as if it’s the most normal thing to ruminate over, ‘but it wasn’t a Eureka moment.’ It’s hard to imagine Duthie getting excited enough about anything to leap out the bath and streak naked around town like Archimedes. He’s more likely to order a coffee, or something stronger in the evening, and then strike up a cigarette to congratulate himself.
John’s vision was to create a poker tour made for the serious player with deep stacks and slow blind structures, in the greatest venues from across the continent, and to broadcast the entire tournament rather than just the final table.
So Duthie embarked on a whirlwind European trip in a bid to convince the casinos to get involved. It was a personal investment that set him back some $100,000 in flights and legal costs but he believed that there was a European tour just waiting to happen.
As Duthie surmises, ‘It’s almost like when you’re going to make a pass at somebody. You’ve got to think you’re going to have a 65 percent strike rate. Everyone hates rejection. I wasn’t going to waste my time if I didn’t think I could make it work.’
Once he realised that a few of the casinos, including London’s Victoria Grosvenor, were interested in his idea it took him just six months to get the first season on its feet, with sports production company Sunset+Vine producing the televised event and major online poker site PokerStars.com involved as the Tour’s sponsor.
Conrad Brunner, head of communications in Europe for PokerStars explains why the site got involved: ‘John Duthie was looking for a sponsor that could provide the financial backing he required, but he also needed a partner who could supply the right online qualification structure.’
And there are many players who are using that process to get through to the big-money live events. Almost 30 percent of this year’s Monte Carlo Grand Final qualified through PokerStars and they’re no slouches at the table either, with players such as EPT Copenhagen winner Noah Boeken, American tournament legend T.J. Cloutier, Brit Keith Hawkins and the heads-up finalists Marc Karam and Gavin Griffin among them. ‘In 2004, there was a growing understanding of the importance of online qualification, but John was way ahead of the game in seeing its importance for the EPT,’ says Brunner.
The first season kicked off with a €1,000 no-limit Hold’em freezeout at Casino Barcelona in September 2004 before passing through London, Dublin, Copenhagen, Deauville, Vienna and finishing up some six months later in Monte Carlo for the first Grand Final. That year 211 runners competed for the €635,000 first prize, which was won by veteran Dutch player Rob Hollink.
Since then two more seasons have passed, with incredible growth in fields and prize pools each time. There have now been 22 live EPT tournaments, which have created a total prize pool of €34,121,961. What’s more, the winners in Season 3 have just got better and better with Roland de Wolfe taking down the Irish event, and Vicky Coren providing a fairytale story in London. When the poker writer, broadcaster and Old Vic regular took down the London EPT on September 24, 2006, for £500,000 Coren became the first woman to win a major European tournament, and in her home from home – the Vic casino.
It took just two hands heads-up for Coren to finish her Australian opponent, Emad Tahtou, when she flopped a straight. As Coren puts it, ‘Winning an EPT event in my home town, in my home casino, was an incredible experience that I won’t forget in a hurry. I was very proud that the Vic was hosting an EPT event and I hoped that one of the regular Vic players would win it – and one of them did!’
Newcomer
Season 3’s success has paved the way for more events to be added in Season 4. With the extra workload that will bring Duthie has drafted in an irascible bundle of energy in the form of Lee Jones. The former PokerStars online manager is a respected figure within the online community and is probably best known for hosting the site’s Sunday Million – the biggest weekly online tournament. Jones is the perfect foil for the languid Duthie, who himself admits that he is not an effusive character. ‘I feel uncomfortable when I’m up on the stage. I’m poles apart from that guy in the Cillit Bang advert.’
Jones is anything but stage-shy so expect to see a lot more of him fronting the big events. An excited Jones ponders, ‘Can you imagine what people would have thought about 700 players paying €10,000 each three years ago? It would have been unthinkable. Where will we be in another three years?’
Jones asks a valid question. The EPT has grown year on year and the demand for seats at the fourth season of the EPT, which kicks off at the Casino Barcelona at the end of August, is inevitably going to be high. The EPT London, the second leg of the tour, takes place in the middle of September and somewhat delicately sandwiched between the two is a tournament that promises a lot – the inaugural World Series of Poker Europe, which will be hosting the first three official WSOP bracelet events outside Las Vegas.
Without any hint of sour grapes Duthie believes that ‘the WSOP should stay in the States. The WSOP used to be something very exclusive and special. A bracelet used to mean something. They’ve created the World Championship events [this year] to try to nullify the effect [and] I don’t think the WSOPE will have anything like the prestige of the [WSOP] Main Event’.
The authenticity of the tour is of the utmost importance to Duthie who doesn’t want to leave behind the core idea of creating top quality festivals. ‘The WPT has gone a bit crazy and has about 18 [events],’ says Duthie. ‘I don’t think we’ll have more than 12 events but those events will get bigger and bigger. It will come to a point where we’ll probably be forced to cap the event and increase the buy- ins, even though I’m very reluctant to do so, to manage numbers. The problem is that there aren’t venues physically big enough in Europe.’
There is the option to introduce more than two starting days but Duthie is loathe to do it. ‘What are the players going to do in their two or three days off? [If the venues are at capacity] there’s no room for cash games,’ says Duthie. And the limited capacities are only going to
Damn yanks
Vicky Coren isn’t surprised by the US influx: ‘The EPT is a fantastic series: prestigious, lucrative, well-structured, well-run, player- friendly tournaments in some of the greatest locations in Europe. And don’t underestimate that last bit – they’re a great excuse to visit amazing cities like Barcelona, Dublin and Deauville. I’ve met four different American poker players who were seeing Europe for the first time after winning EPT seats on PokerStars, and were so overwhelmed by the romance of cobbled streets and rare steak that they proposed to their girlfriends on the spot.’
With the Harrah’s-owned World Series of Poker Europe and WPT making small inroads into Europe, it’s as if the American poker- playing world has just woken up to the fact that the rest of the world plays. And with two major no-limit Hold’em tournaments in London just after the EPT Barcelona, a whole host of major international players will be in the UK this September to witness that fact.
Providing both festivals stay regular fixtures, London could easily become the obligatory post-WSOP destination. Which means for the EPT, European players, and the UK poker industry, things have never looked better. Roll on September.
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