How/Why does professional poker benefit from a "tour"?

As far as I can tell, all poker tournaments are “self-funded”. Ie, the players themselves have to “buy in” to the poker tournaments, and some of their buy-in money gets withheld to go towards paying for the running of the tournament. The rest gets pooled in to the prizemoney.

This makes it markedly different from other professional sports tours, such as golf and tennis, in which I guess that major benefit of “touring” is to draw money from the local market where said tournaments get held.

So… how/why does professional poker benefit from the various tours (WPT, EPT, etc) it has?

I believe that the major tours get money from TV which offsets expenses. That is, the players buy in but the rake is much smaller than it would be from a tournament at a casino.

So the players get guaranteed big-money tournaments with subsidized rakes.

Additionally, being on TV makes the players more likely to get sponsorship, which can exceed any actual poker winnings. With the online poker sites getting shut down this might change the math significantly.

Jas09 mostly has it right, although in practice the money from TV does not offset the rake nearly as much as it should, if at all, which has in the past caused poker players to believe that they are being taken advantage of by these tours.

These tours provide destinations for players to come together to all pony up the 10k to play the tournament. Without them, I just don’t see why anyone would travel to play a random event that happened to have a high buy in.

The tours also provide opportunities for local casinos to pull in players for ‘satellite’ tournaments. A lot of players who make their way into the main events do so by winning satellite tournaments around the country. Not many people have $10K lying around that they can afford to spend on a poker tournament entry, but lots of them have $500 they can spare to enter a major satellite. Hell, some of them even bootstrap their way up through multiple satellites starting with a free buy-in or maybe a small buy-in like $50 or $100. The tour acts like a sieve, pulling in money from around the country through thousands of satellite tournaments, and collecting it for the ‘big event’ and those big payouts that make for good television.

So a ‘tour’ changes a one-shot event which benefits one casino and a small group of wealthy players into a nationwide business that pulls players into poker rooms across the country and keeps the poker economy moving in general. It also provides amateurs with an opportunity to play against the pros, which is also good for TV.

Actually, I think one point of the poker tour is to draw money from the local market. First of course, the tour is sponsored, so there are some of the same economics as any other pro sports tour. But specific to poker, where player entry fees are the primary funding, one reason to bring the tour somewhere is to attract local amateurs who might pony up an entry fee to try their luck/skill in a nearby tournament, but are unlikely to go all the way to Vegas. As noted, the satellite entry system facilitates this: there might only be a couple guys in Boston who’d plunk down $10,000 for a tournament in Foxwoods, but won’t go to Vegas to play, but there are probably more than a couple hundred guys who’d throw in $100 for a chance at a Foxwoods tournament but who would never travel to Vegas for the same.

Poker is an interesting game, especially in tournament format. It’s one of the few games where amateurs regularly get the opportunity to play with the best in the world. Even though they’re overmatched over the long-term, a skilled amateur or just total luck-box might win. Heck, you never know - I could be the guy that knocks Phil Ivey or Tom Dwan out.

So the professionals tour from city to city to participate in big buy-in tournaments with huge fields of players, knowing that over the course of many tournaments, they’ll show a profit. Amateurs play hoping to turn a relatively small investment into a huge payday. And of course, they’ll get the chance to test their skills against the very best.

The casinos love to sponsor the tournaments because it brings tons of players out of the woodwork. Heck, I’ve never been to Vegas to play in a huge tournament, but I can certainly drive to Atlantic City to play.

Moved to the Game Room from GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

if there wasn’t luck involved, Phil Hellmuth would win every one. :smiley:

None of the money they get from TV coverage or sponsorships or any of that goes into the prize pool or offsets the cost. The poker players pay the entirety of the prize pool and costs for the event. The event organizer collects both the tournament entry fees (most of the money goes into the prize pool, but you pay extra up front that goes directly to the organizer) and also gets paid by the TV networks for the coverage. The players get no direct benefits from the TV coverage or the nature as a “tour”, so it’s not really comparable at all to the PGA tour and such.