Why major tournament schedules clash
Why is it that events like WCOOP, the PowerFest and XL Eclipse get scheduled at the same time as each other?
September will be a massive month for online poker as the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), the partypoker PowerFest and the 888poker XL Eclipse Championship are all taking place, all with huge guarantees.
There was a time when WCOOP would stand alone as the only major online festival but next month two of PokerStars’ biggest rivals are launching their equivalent festivals essentially at the same time. The PowerFest in particular is exciting because it has $35 million in guarantees and several Super High Roller events - direct competition to WCOOP.
Which leaves one to ponder, is it a good business move to schedule your flagship online festival at the same time as your rivals?
Go where the customers are
I remember once discussing with a friend who worked in retail a similar phenomena. I was surprised to see three sports clothing stores open within 50 feet of each other in the high street of my home town. My laymen’s logic felt that it made more sense to open your store as far away from your rival as possible, so that you are the only sports clothing store for several miles and thus have all the market share for the area.
My friend pointed out that when a rival sports store opens next to a competitor, they do so because they can poach customers who were previously heading to the original store. Instead of being the only sports store in town a few miles up the road, they instead went where the sports clothing customers were proven to already be.
This essentially seems to be what is happening when we see a series like PowerFest happen at the same time as WCOOP. My own laymen logic again would say that the poker community has a limited bankroll and surely cannot afford to do both, but it is guaranteed that the serious poker fraternity will be grinding online in September, so it makes sense for rivals to also have something to offer them.
Increasing the size of the pie
This is not dissimilar to what we see live when two major tours will work together to ensure their schedules do not clash but instead complement each other. For example every December in Prague we have seen PokerStars, the WPT, partypoker LIVE and the GSOP, to name just a few, coordinate to have their events run concurrently as part of a larger festival. The poker world is already in Prague, so it makes sense for everybody to get in on the action.
In this respect, I genuinely do consider ‘online’ to be a place on the live poker circuit, in that everyone has to get to a region of the world that allows PokerStars, partypoker and 888poker. It makes perfect sense for rival online festivals to take place right now, because right now there will be the biggest concentration of serious players in a region where they can play online (it also explains why only Micro Millions and similar low stakes festivals happened around the WSOP).
I’ve witnessed a similar thing as the co-author of Jared Tendler’s books The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2. I personally believe Jared has reinvented the field of poker psychology and we have seen a lot of mental game coaches and books come into the game since then. This was something I was nervous about because they are obviously competitors, but we actually think it has helped sales of our own book, because these new mental game coaches and books have helped to expand the overall audience. Instead of treating it like they are taking our share of the pie, the pie is getting bigger, which is what is happening when we see all the major sites launch their biggest online events of the year at the same time.
Would you prefer to see the major online events spread out over the year? Let us know in the comments:
