In a move that is leaving many shaking their heads, the World Poker Tour (WPT) announced last week that its season will no longer conclude with the venerable WPT World Championship, but rather a new, invite-only WPT Tournament of Champions.
Actually, one of the interesting parts of the announcement was that it was not a direct announcement. On Wednesday, November 4th, the WPT put out a press release about the new WPT Tournament of Champions, not actually saying that the WPT World Championship was gone. There was mention that the Tournament of Champions will be a season-ending event, but never was it said that it is replacing the WPT World Championship.
Then, today, the WPT issued a press release to announce the schedule for the rest of the current season, Season XIV. It is there that we can see that the Tournament of Champions is the final event of the season and that the WPT World Championship is off the schedule. The discussion of the schedule in the press release does not mention this.
One could gather from all of this that the WPT knew this would not be a popular decision and thus opted to not come straight out and say, “THE WPT WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP IS DEAD.”
In one of the aforementioned press releases, WPT President and CEO Adam Pliska said, “By combining Season XIV winners and WPT Champions Club members, the season-ending WPT Tournament of Champions will truly be a championship event. We will promote the ‘champion of champions’ to our millions of television viewers and to the thousands of players in the community for seasons to come, solidifying the winner’s place in the World Poker Tour’s rich history.”
Mike Sexton played his role of head cheerleader, exclaiming, “The show that started it all continues to evolve after fourteen years, with the exciting new WPT Tournament of Champions. I love that the WPT is going to a TOC format for the season-ending event – it will be the best of the best to determine the ultimate champion!”
The WPT Tournament of Champions, though an invitational, is not a freeroll. The buy-in will be a hefty $15,400. This is in line with last year’s WPT World Championship, which was $15,400 after forever costing $25,000. It also moved its long-time home of the Bellagio in Las Vegas across the country to the Borgata in Atlantic City.
This change is not going over particularly well in the poker community. Poker pro and major tournament mainstay Christian “charder30” Harder called it “terrible,” and tweeted, “WPT just replaced one of the most prestigious poker titles for an invitational made for TV tourney.”
Lance Bradley, former Editor in Chief of Bluff Magazine, tweeted that he and poker media maven Kevin Mathers went over a list of WPT champs and determined that just five would definitely pony up the $15,400 to play and another four might.
People may not like the decision (and I may have been a bit snarky about it, as well), but let’s be honest: the WPT World Championship was dying. At its most popular, in 2007, the first prize Carlos Mortensen won was nearly $4 million and 639 players entered. But as mentioned, the buy-in was lowered from $25,000 to $15,000 (+ $400) last year after attendance had fallen to just 149 two years ago. The Atlantic City version in 2014 drew 90 more players, but that’s really nothing significant.
Poker fans may have a warm spot in their hearts for the WPT World Championship, but the tourney just wasn’t working anymore. Trying something different might feel weird, but it might also be necessary.
