The Philadelphia Daily News ran a story today on a couple of changes at the Borgata Poker Open. The paper stated the buy-in for the Main Event (a WPT tournament) would be set at $3,500 with a guaranteed prize-pool of $2 million.

While online poker players may be used to seeing guaranteed prize-pools this is something new for a live poker tournament. In fact, this could set a major precedent if the Borgata tournament is a huge success.

Another eye-popper is the extremely low buy-in for a WPT Main Event. The $3,500 entry-fee seems like a mid-level preliminary event buy-in, not a WPT Championship. However, the move makes sense if you look at the recent numbers at other WPT stops: Attendance has plummeted roughly 25% across the board; and in some cases over 40%!

The people at Borgata are definitely thinking outside the box, which is a good thing; but I have to question their judgment in making both changes simultaneously: If the tournament is a success they will be left pondering if it was because of the low buy-in, the guaranteed prize-pool, or a combination of the two factors. Shuffle-up and deal Borgata!

Related posts:

1. 2012 WSOP $1 million tournament will be bracelet event When the idea of a special $1 million buy-in tournament (with some proceeds going to the OneDrop Charity, precisely $111,111 from every entry) during the...

Tags: Borgata Casino, World Poker Tour, WPT

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Tournament News, WPT News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.