The World Poker Tour announced this week that its private, subscription-based poker room, Club WPT, has partnered with cable channel Fox Sports Net to air special tournaments above and beyond the 26 episodes that will make up Season VII of the WPT. Club WPT players will battle it out online in elimination blackjack and poker in an attempt to win seats into the weekly series on FSN. Club WPT isn’t an online poker room; rather, it operates under sweepstakes rules in the United States, which skirts around any complications with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. It was launched in January, 2008.
Steve Lipscomb, Founder, CEO, and President of the World Poker Tour, commented “FSN is a reigning media giant whose unparalleled energy and resources will benefit CLUBWPT.com on a whole new level. We look forward to building our relationship with them and establishing additional deals to help reach the huge market potential that CLUBWPT.com holds.”
Membership to Club WPT is free. For $19.95 per month, members can get access to magazine subscriptions, travel discounts, and special content. In order to play instantaneously and seamlessly in tournaments on the site, a paid subscription is required. As a free, but more painstaking alternative, players can send their account information on a postcard and mail it to the WPT, noting the tournament they’d like to enter on it.
Every month, Club WPT offers a $20,000 prize pool poker tournament. Held on the very last day of the month, the tournament has six satellites to it that award seats to the top ten finishers. Every night at 9:00pm ET and every Saturday and Sunday at 3:00pm ET, Club WPT runs a $1,000 tournament.
If 21 is your game, $1,000 Elimination Blackjack tournaments are also available. If you’ll remember Elimination Blackjack was played as part of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, which was shown on CBS in the United States in 2006. Many of poker’s biggest names, including Phil Laak and Annie Duke, competed. Monica “Mucker” Reeves, Blair Rodman, and “Hollywood” Dave Stann were among the champions of each tournament.
In addition, Club WPT is offering packages into, you guessed it, the WPT Championship held at the Bellagio next spring. On the last Tuesday of August (and every month for the foreseeable future), a WPT Championship tournament will be held on the site. The winner takes home a $2,620 super satellite seat, $1,380 to be used for travel and spending, and dinner with a professional poker player. I guess you might as well learn from the best.
The deal with Fox Sports Net to air Club WPT tournaments comes on the heels of the announcement that the seventh season of the World Poker Tour will be broadcast on the cable network, which reaches more than 80 million homes in the United States. The WPT will air as part of a national television package on Sunday nights, with a starting time to be determined. The first five seasons of the WPT aired on The Travel Channel. In Season VI, programming moved to GSN, which abruptly decided not to renew for Season VII. The WPT and FSN reached an agreement several weeks ago to air 26 one-hour episodes, which is a departure from the current two-hour format.
We’ll have additional information on Club WPT tournaments on Fox Sports Net. Right now, ClubWPT.com merely states that more details are coming “soon.”