The newly formed International Stadium Poker Tour, headed by French mogul Bernard Tapie, announced plans to launch massive live poker tournaments in the world’s largest stadiums! Their first event has been announced, a massive $30 Million live tournament to take place in Wembley Stadium, London, in September 2012!
This massive tournament is set to have a structure unlike any tournament that has come before. The ISPT is expecting to have 20,000-30,000 entrants. The action will be broken down into three phases. In phase one, each player will be competing from their stadium seats, on electronic pads, provided to them by the tournament organizers! The challenge for the tournament organizers will be to attract casual players. While for hardcore poker crowd and online players, going to a stadium to grind poker on a computer screen sounds like just another day in the life. It remains to be seen whether or not this unusual format will be a smash with casual players.
Wembley Poker 2012 hopes to rival the WSOP Main Event in Las Vegas! This year’s WSOP Main Event featured a $65 Million prize pool. The Wembley Stadium 2012 event announced a guarantee of $30 Million, with a planned payout for first place of $10 Million! If this payout structure holds true, the winner of the Wembley Poker event would win the second biggest tournament score of all time, behind Jamie Gold’s $12 Million WSOP Main Event win in 2006!
Bernard Tapie, the owner of the International Stadium Poker Tour, is the same French investor who recently submitted paperwork to the government to purchase the troubled Full Tilt Poker. That sale is being reviewed by the government at this time. Tapie’s announcement of this International Poker Stadium Tour has the poker world buzzing. Rumors are swirling that this stadium tour could signal the revival of Full Tilt under the leadership of Bernard Tapie, and that Bovada software will be used to provide the Wembley entrants a poker client to compete on.
Qualifications for Wembley 2012 start January 2012. An exact date is yet to be set. The tournament has a target date sometime in the first two weeks of September, with a window of of August 15th to October 9th. A final date will be announced in November once the national soccer team schedule has been announced. The Wembley tournament is planned to take five days.
After the completion of phase one, in which 20-30,000 players sitting at Wembley battle it out over electronic pads, the top 3,000 players will then enter phase two, “real mode”. In phase two, these 3,000 runners will go down onto the lawn at Wembley Stadium and play on real tables with real decks and real dealers. All 3,000 of these players will earn a piece of the $3 Million guarantee and will play until only 10 player remain!
Phase three is the final table, where the last 10 players are planned to battle it out for $17.5 Million in prize money! First place is planned to win $10 Million!
The announcement of the ISPT Wembley has garnered the attention of poker fans the world over! The Wembley Stadium Tournament signals strong corporate interest in poker, in Europe, as well as a positive sign for the future of Full Tilt Poker. They are shooting to take live poker to a level not seen outside of the World Series in Las Vegas. It will be exciting as official dates are announced, details about the International Stadium Poker Tour are divulged, and event qualifiers open up to the public in January of 2012!