Black Hawk, Colorado Poker News
September 1, 2011
TPF Editorial
WPT vs. HPT
September will be an interesting month for the Black Hawk poker scene, especially the tournament scene.
The Isle has the “WPT Regional Event” (a.k.a “Colorado Poker Showdown”) and Golden Gates has the “Heartland Poker Tour” practically overlapping in schedules. The Isle began running satellites for the WPT on September 1st and the actual “WPT Regional Events” run from October 5th-9th. Golden Gates starts the HPT on September 23rd and it runs through October 2nd. Will players deplete their bankroll on the HPT or save it for the WPT? Or will both events draw enough players to make both a huge success? We’ll see.
As far as the WPT at the Isle goes, it has been interesting to hear and read all of the speculation about the “Regional Event” that has been promoted by the Isle for some time. Some online forums had discussions suggesting that the Isle wasn’t actually going to have the WPT at all because of contractual disputes, others suggested that the Colorado Division of Gaming never approved the WPT at the Isle, and others just spewed forth total garbage about the whole thing. There were also plenty of people talking around Black Hawk about the fact that the WPT website itself didn’t list the Isle as a Regional Event and that maybe there was some truth to the gossip.
Well, a week or so ago Matt Savage posted on a popular online forum that indeed the WPT would be held at the Isle and today I saw the Isle finally listed on the official WPT website. What is interesting is that the WPT has a disclaimer that reads “WPT is not responsible for any tournament event details including, without limitation, structures, schedules, formats, general rules or prize pool distributions”. Huh? How can this be a “WPT Regional Event” if the WPT is not responsible for anything at all? This same disclaimer is listed for other “Regional Events” as well so I guess it’s standard.
It seems to me that the WPT just sells the WPT name to a poker room who can then use that name for promotional purposes and that’s it. Otherwise, it’s just a big buy-in tournament at [insert poker room name here] with “WPT Regional Event” attached to it. The word is that the Isle paid $40,000 to use the WPT name. That’s a lot of cheese!
Personally, I’m a bit disappointed. I figured that there would be satellites into a giant WPT event somewhere where I could potentially be playing against some big names with Matt Savage running the show, TV cameras around, etc. Not so. But I have never participated in a “WPT Regional Event” before so maybe I had my expectations too high to begin with. The Heartland Poker Tour at the Gates does have the TV cameras though, so maybe that will draw some players their way.
But in the end, who really cares? There will be several big buy-in tournaments this fall in Black Hawk, which is a good thing. I don’t care if the tournament is called “Jack and Jill’s Big-Ass Poker Tournament” if there’s a good structure and a decent turn out. And if the casino wants to drop a ton of cash on a name, that’s fine. I don’t care about the name. And I’ll probably look fat on TV anyway. 
Bad Beat Mania
The Black Hawk Bad Beat Jackpot scene has changed recently. With Ameristar hitting a few BBJs in the last several weeks, we have seen all jackpots in Black Hawk dip below $150,000 for the first time in a long while. Ameristar had $300,000 or more on their board for a very long time. Many have attributed Ameristar’s poker room success to their huge bad beat numbers and some of that may be true. But Ameristar also has a very big, very nice hotel, and that has a big impact as well. And since they’ve had the action for so long, it’ll be hard for another room to draw that action away from there.
The Lodge is jumping on the opportunity to draw in players by combining their BBJ tiers and adding $100,000 of house money to the jackpot, bringing their jackpot to more than $300,000 which is almost double the next biggest BBJ in town (Isle – see below).
The Lodge and Ameristar are both at “quads beaten” for a BBJ qualifier. The long-held belief has been “build it and they will come”, meaning build a big enough Bad Beat Jackpot and players will go to that room. This has proven to be true over and over again in Black Hawk’s poker history since the early 90′s. Of course “quads beaten” doesn’t happen very often so the jackpots grow and grow over time. Time will tell if the Lodge’s gamble on combining all three tiers and adding $100K of house money pays off.
For the record, I think Bad Beat Jackpots are terrible. Here’s why.
Poker News
The Lodge
The Lodge has dumped $100,000 of house money into their Bad Beat Jackpot - the jackpot is now over $300,000.
The “Tournament of Champions” will be held on Saturday, September 3rd for those who qualified in August. This is a $5,000 Freeroll. You can qualify for the October “TOC” by placing in the top 3 of any Lodge tournament in September.
The Isle
The WPT Regional Event satellites began today. The entire WPT schedule is posted here. They got one “Single Table Mega-Satellite Qualifier” today. Please post a comment if you play any of these events and have any feedback.
The “$10,000 Freeroll” will be held on Sunday, September 11th for those who qualified in August by playing 40 hours of live action in August.
Golden Gates
The “Heartland Poker Tour” will be held from September 23rd through October 2nd. The entire schedule is posted here. Rumor has it that this may be the last HPT at Golden Gates and they will focus on the “Colorado Poker Championship” in the future instead.
Bad Beat Jackpot$
Lodge
$300,000
Isle of Capri
$160,000
Ameristar
$125,000
Golden Gates
$76,500
Lady Luck
$57,000
Note that there are links for all of the Black Hawk poker rooms at the top of this page.
Information about the individual poker rooms can found there. A page listing the tournament schedules for Black Hawk is also up there so you can get all of the Black Hawk poker tournament information in one place.
