Posts Tagged ‘Senior Poker Tour’

College Poker Tour hoping to capitalize on Niche

Tuesday, March 25th, 2014

A few months ago, we discussed the Senior Poker Tour, which is seeking to take advantage of a growing senior population in the game. Now, we have the College Poker Tour trying to capitalize on another niche filled with frat boys, hipsters, jocks and partiers.

Moving on from my lame college stereotypes, the CPT is an online poker room that’s been developed by All In Magazine. The site is going to be running qualifiers and competitions from March 26th – May 26th that give student poker players a chance to represent their school. The only cost to compete is a flat $50 league fee. And the prize is the chance to win a prize package to a Las Vegas-based poker tournament.

As All In states, there’s a pretty big poker culture at universities across America. “The potential is unlimited,” said Patrick Barthe, the CPT’s executive director. “We’ve done the research and, whether people want to believe it or not, college students of both genders are regularly playing poker. Whether it’s home games in their dorm rooms, visiting a casino, or playing online. The popularity is there, and it’s as strong as ever.”

Barthe went on to discuss how he hopes the CPT can make poker a legitimate college sport one day, just like football, basketball, tennis or anything else. “We’re using the same concepts and the same type of scoring system, except there are more students playing poker regularly than there are playing tennis,” Barthe said.

There are over 17 million university students in the United States, so the market potential is definitely there. But it’s difficult to say how successful the CPT will ultimately be. The organization did do their research, though, and found that many big schools like Notre Dame, Duke, LSU, Michigan, UCLA, MIT and Purdue have poker clubs which feature up to 150 players apiece. This being said, there are some encouraging factors in place for the CPT.

McEvoy, Johnson headline Senior Poker Tour

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

The number of entrants in the WSOP Seniors Hold’em Championship increased by almost 300 people this year, hitting a record of 4,407 players. Apparently, WSOP winners Tom McEvoy and Linda Johnson took notice of this since they’re headlining a new poker tournament series that’s dedicated entirely to seniors.

Appropriately titled the Senior Poker Tour (SPT), this series will hold its first official event at the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica from January 15-19. There’ll be 17 tournaments at SPT Tunica, with a $550 buy-in Main Event serving as the marquee tourney.

In a poker world where Main Event buy-ins commonly range from $1k to $10k or more, the $550 amount is certainly interesting. Back when many senior players were younger, this is around what buy-ins used to cost. So you can bet that more older players will be encouraged to get involved in the SPT.

Overall, this definitely seems like a good thing for poker because seniors are becoming a larger part of the market. Aside from the WSOP Seniors Championship, a lot of players aged 50 and over are entering other tournaments too. Given that these grinders have some money on their hands, it’s definitely a good idea to encourage participation among this demographic.

So does this mean that the SPT is headed for success? Well, the idea of a seniors-only poker organization is a relatively new concept in today’s game. And obviously the SPT is never going to grow as large as the WSOP, EPT or WPT, where anybody can enter, regardless of age.

But as pointed out in the beginning, poker is rapidly growing among older players. So it seems that now is as good of time as any to open up a tournament series that caters specifically to seniors.