Club WPT

Last night, just before heading to bed, I received a notice that I had a new email waiting to be read on my Yahoo! Mail account. Not too surprising – since I basically use that address whenever an email address is requested by a site that I would rather not give my “real” address to, I get quite a bit of spam there. The message I got last night, however, had “WPT” in the “From” field. This, of course, translates to something from the World Poker Tour and (seeing as I am actually a holder of some WPTE stock – I’m down more than three grand with that investing SNAFU…) I figured I might as well check it out.

What it ended up being was an invitation to join their recently created Club WPT. Oh great, another online poker site … but this one’s a bit different. They’re setting this thing up as a membership based “club” where no actual money is ever wagered. Members pay a membership fee (about $20 a month) and, according to their webpage, are then allowed “unlimited play” in over 5,000 tournaments each month.

But that’s not exactly true… I discovered what the membership fee actually gets you is 500 TPs (Tournament Points) and something like $2,000 in play money. As for the play money, I haven’t really looked into that yet; although I’m thinking that it’s just like play money on all the other poker sites out there which translates to nothing. The Tournament Points appear to be what most members will be interested in as these are used to “buy-in” to tournaments that have actual prizes.

The thing is that you need quite a bit more than 500 TPs to “buy-in” to the tournaments with the good prizes. It costs 2,000 FPs to do a direct “buy-in” for the monthly $10,000 tournament and I counted somewhere around nine other tournaments for the month of January that were priced at $1,000 TPs or higher. The nicest prizes do have “Super Satellites” with lower buy-ins (the $10,000 tournament has a Satellite you can buy-in to for 100 TPs) but don’t kid yourself into believing that the “unlimited play” advertised means you can play all of the tournaments.

Not that I have any issues with this. I firmly believe that you’re going to get better play from players that had to earn their way to their seats. It just seems to me that the only real difference with Club WPT is that the actual money has been replaced by Tournament Points. And, of course, along with the prizes that can be won, Tournament Points are also included. So, although you never risk any more money than your membership fee to play at Club WPT, the Tournament Points are clearly a virtual form of money that members are risking and attempting to win. I suppose it could be considered a much less expensive way for those with a bit of a poker addiction to be able to play and still get to experience the risk/reward aspect of the game. There are, after all, real prizes (including cash) to be won…

Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but what happens if you lose all of your TPs? Wouldn’t that make it impossible to win anything?” This is where the entire “club membership” aspect starts to play out. You see, as long as you are a member in this club, you are guaranteed a minimum of 500 TPs every day. Now that doesn’t mean that 500 TPs are given to all members each and every day – that would negate the need to actually play What it does mean is that at 12:01am on any day, if your TP balance is less than 500, the balance is automatically reset to 500 TPs. So you’re always able to start again if you have a bad luck streak without risking any more actual money.

Now granted, the user interface kind of sucks; but I’m betting that, with possible upgrades in time, it will improve. Are you listening Club WPT? You really do need to do some work on your UI design – you might want to talk to the guys over at PKR.com – a UI like theirs would really get the “club” atmosphere you guys are striving for. Apart from that, I think this “poker club” idea could actually catch on. Who knows? Maybe I can get some of the three grand I dumped into your stock back…

bis später,

Coriolis