Home / Poker News June 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – Stadiums Poker Tour and High School Poker
The Poker Grapevine – Stadiums Poker Tour and High School Poker
Posted by: Jo Martin - Fri, 2012-06-15 07:51
Bernard Tapie may have slipped off the
online poker map after it became clear that the French conglomerate wasn’t going to acquire Full Tilt Poker after all, and many thought that whatever poker endeavors GBT were rumored to be involved in would also be cancelled. The first details about the International Stadiums Poker Tour (ISPT) emerged last year, and since then not much has been heard about the GBT initiative. It appears though that the French have been busy getting things together for the first ISPT event, and they have now communicated the date of the first epic live poker confrontation of the Tour: the event will apparently take place from May 31 to June 6, 2013, at Wembley Stadium in London. According to the organizers, no fewer than 2,119 players have already registered for the event which will feature a €4,3k buy-in and a €20 million guarantee, complete with a rather unique format.
Organizers expect around 30k players to register. Players will apparently sit in the stands and play from a pad provided by the organizers. When the field thins down enough, the action moves down to the pitch where actual tables will be set up, so players will compete in a traditional live-tournament format.
In other news: high schools in the UK are apparently urged by International Poker Federation President Anthony Holden to introduce poker as an official extra-curricular activity. If the plan ever materializes, the high schools that will implement the program won’t be the first to do so. There’s a high school in New York, The Henry Street School, which has added poker to its list of official extra- curricular activities in 2007 and it currently has the only sanctioned poker club in the city. The Henry Street kids are apparently good too: in 2008, they took on their Harvard Law School counterparts at the green felt and walked away winners.
Would poker qualify as an education tool? It certainly promotes memory and behavior-pattern reading as well as on-the-fly probability calculus and negotiations skills.
