Joined: Apr '11
Location: Romania
Age: 58 (M)
Posts: 2432
In 2013, the International Stadiums Poker Tour should take place in London, but there are still a lot of open questions. In the autumn of 2011 the International Stadiums Poker Tour (ISPT) was announced; a huge event to take place at Wembley Stadium in London.
After this, there were teething troubles. First the tournament was announced for mid-2012, then September 2012. Now it is scheduled for May 31 - June 6, 2013.
Laurent Tapie, who organised the whole event, confirmed in 2011 that the prize pool of $30 million is guaranteed and reserved in a bank account.
Later, they spoke of a guaranteed prize pool of €20 million - some weeks ago they deleted the word "guaranteed" from their official homepage.
Because of incidents like this, the huge announced tournament is a mystery for many players, who are "rightly sceptical" according to ISPT marketing man Georges Djen.
"It's something new that didn't happen in the past - it is an ambitious project." According to Djen, the project has been in planning for over two years.
"At least 15,000 players must come, otherwise the tournament won't take place," he said. "But we could guarantee that this will the hugest tournament in the world in terms of the participants. A maximum of 30,000 players could play."
The plan is as follows: first, all players play online against each other in Wembley Stadium. The top of the field will then take to the pitch and play live poker down to a winner.
The typical weather in London will not affect the latter part of the tournament, with Djen stating that "there are many rooms and VIP boxes inside the stadium. We will also have poker tables set up in these areas."
All players who want to participate can choose between three different tickets. A regular ticket costs €600 and one seat with a rebuy or an add-on is €1,200. Those who want to play directly at the live final must pay €6,000. At the moment, 3,338 players are registered for the tournament according to the ISPT homepage.
Djen said that 7,000 seats were given to the Partouche Poker Group [Ed: this interview was conducted before the cancellation of the Partouche Poker Tour]. These seats will be available via satellites both live and online. There will also be satellites at other poker rooms.
There will be approximately 30 side events, with the full schedule to be released in two or three weeks.
Joined: May '08
Location: Lithuania
Age: 39 (M)
Posts: 10090
now lets think- first they change the date, second- they change the guaranteed prizepool, third- they cannot even guarantee the prizepool? now how can this sound positive what's next? they cannot guarantee that tournament is gonna happen in london, because botswana offered guaranteed amount of 5kg bananas to all participans, and they seem like a great country to organize the event
Joined: Oct '09
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 57 (M)
Posts: 667
You are both right....... Indeed Tapie needs to liven his act up. There will be loads of people attend and if you have the patience I should imagine 80% of them will be fish. Does anyone know how many players will move onto the live part of the tourney? Is this a % of the total people entered? I should think that it should be easy to get to the final 20% if you play tight and right at the start.
Pochui - The amount of bananas has been reduced to 1Kg........losses in the market !!!
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Portugal
Age: 44 (M)
Posts: 4827
I believe it will happen in London as it was first previewed and scheduled. In my opinion, the main reason for the delay were the Olympic Games, which mobilized a lot of people. If this event would take place at that time, the impact would be so low that everyone would be sad with the results. This way, having the chance to promote it without the competition of such a spectacular event as the Olympic Games (which, in terms of opening and closing party, where the best of all times, for me), the event will be even better, and it will attract a lot more in a more secure way.
Joined: Oct '10
Location: Malta
Age: 43 (M)
Posts: 44
I have been looking forward to this event for ages. Gonna be a ton of fish and a ton of sit outs due to extreme early registration and the fact that you need to turn up with a working laptop to participate. How many laptops are gonna stop working a week before, dropped on way and then there are the chavs in London knowing there are gonna be an extra 30,000 laptops on the street that weekend with access to poker accounts on them, they are gonna have a field day (btw remove all save passwords/ auto logins if you do go). I wonder if the games will be iPad/Android compatable. A tablet would make things so much easier.
Edit. Just changed my mind. If you hit top10% and move to round 2, or just pay the 6k buy in, you start with 10BB and ante kicks in straight away. I am not paying that much for a hyper turbo tournament. Might as well spend the money on lottery tickets
Edited by WozzaMignun (18 September 2012 @ 15:39 GMT)
Joined: Mar '12
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 40 (M)
Posts: 1277
This sounds like a total ballsup.
They figured this would be a major event and signed up some big hitters when things started to look a little ugly, that is they didn't get the number of positive reviews and signups they expected.
So the prize pool starts to shrink, people's confidence starts to wane - and you know what? There's a s**t tonne of other tournaments people would rather play.
Can you imagine the internet crashing as hundreds try to qualify for the seats?lol. Gonna need solid net security etc etc.
what's next? they cannot guarantee that tournament is gonna happen in london, because botswana offered guaranteed amount of 5kg bananas to all participans, and they seem like a great country to organize the event 
