Home / Poker News August 2013 / Full Tilt Poker’s Galway Festival in Hindsight
Full Tilt Poker’s Galway Festival in Hindsight
Posted by: Mark Baldwing - Thu, 2013-08-15 02:33
The 4th stop of the UKIPT’s 4th season, the Galway Poker Festival sponsored by
Full Tilt Poker, was intended to be the most successful stop of the tour, and in some respects it did indeed deliver. In some other ways however, it fell quite woefully short. From the beginning, the stop was plagued by relatively small starting fields, which at one point resulted in the cancellation of €10k Super High Roller. While that alone was a sort of admission of defeat on the part of the organizers, the real blow for them came in the Main Event, which offered a guarantee of €1 million and which ended up featuring an overlay of €140k. While the overlay was definitely good for the players, it was yet another failure for the organizers, casting some heavy clouds over the future of the event in Galway.
The efforts that Full Tilt Poker put into the Galway Poker Festival were quite obvious indeed: the guarantee offered by the Main Event was by far the biggest guarantee of the UKIPT, and Full Tilt Poker mobilized an impressive contingent of its in-house pros to support the whole thing. Gus Hansen was by far the most active and even Viktor Blom showed up to play, although Tom Dwan stayed away for some reason. The site went as far as to hire 3 new pros to fly its colors at the event: Martins Adeniya, Dermot Blain and Sinem Melin.
According to some, at least some of the woes of the Galway Festival can be attributed to the time-frame in which it took place: not long after the
WSOP, and right before the
EPT’s Barcelona stop, a bit of a no man’s land player interest-wise. The organizers were obviously a tad too ambitious in their goals as well, since a €750k guarantee would’ve worked just as well for the Main Event.
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