The North American Poker Tour
Turning the Game of Poker into a Sport of Champions
The North American Poker Tour (NAPT) is set to become the next major tour to grace television land. Why do we need yet another poker tour on TV? Because the NAPT keeps out the riffraff by limiting entry to the top players in the world; they ensure that the tournaments are true tests of skill; and because they have brought tournament impresario Matt Savage on board. Savage, for those of you who are as of yet uninitiated, is the number one televised tournament director in the world.
According to NAPT President and COO, Joseph Wade Mézey, the tour has been modelled after the PGA Tour. “Only professional players are invited to play on the North American Poker Tour. We want to move away from the idea that anyone can win. And we want to stay away from the large fields.”
To keep their tournament a measure of skill, Mézey will limit this year’s $10,000 buy-in event to 270 players, and the only way players can gain entry into the event is to earn it through proven poker prowess. Only the top 200 players in the world, as ranked by Bluff Magazine and Card Player Magazine, are invited to buy into the tourney. Any player not in the top 200 will have to win a qualifying tournament in order to join. And out of the 270, fifty seats will be reserved for the NAPT A-team. “We will sign up fifty players to play a minimum of 80% of the events. We’ll pay for their buy-ins, hotels, travel; essentially we will use them as our core group of players,” said Mézey.
But a great concept wasn’t enough to bring his idea into fruition; Mézey needed Matt Savage, with his knowledge of the poker community, to get his baby off the ground. “My partner Will (Waldrop) and I called Matt Savage in and ran our idea by him. He came on board to help us develop the model. Matt and I spent about four months going through different ideas and models, refining the concept. Then we approached the players for feedback.”
The players liked the model that Mézey and Waldrop developed with Savage, and the NAPT was born. But beyond the hard-nosed pros, the team needed some young blood to make their tournaments truly representative of the North American poker player - that’s where “the net” comes in. “We wanted to get a lot of younger internet players. We wanted to pull from that demographic because it reflects the poker scene today.”
Of course, that’s not to say the NAPT is missing any of the big names. All the big names are board, including Annie Duke, Daniel Negreanu, Howard Lederer, and Antonio Esfandiari; making the NAPT a fully rounded field of battle, where only the most deserving players compete for their share of wealth and glory.
By the end of 2006, the NAPT will have found who it believes is the best player in North America. Rankings to determine the ultimate winner will be based on prize money won during the seven stops on the NAPT, thus determining the champion on the final stop. The events will include a 300 No Limit; 500 No Limit; 1,000 No Limit; a 2,000 No Limit; a 5,000 Limit; a 5,000 Chinese game; and the 10,000 No Limit tournament.
“All main events will be five days, and there is a no-crapshoot final table structure,” says Matt Savage, who is operating the NAPT with an extremely slow blind structure, by televised tournament standards. According to Mézey, most tournaments are operated to fit into the television production schedule issued by the TV networks. His tour is going to force the networks to work around the schedule of his tournaments. But beyond offering a slow blind structure, Savage has a few other tricks up his sleeve. For instance, Savage is using the Second-Chance tournament structure that he introduced to the world at the Monte Carlo Millions. With this structure, the last seat at the final table is awarded to the winner of a one-day “consolation” tournament, which is open to all players that didn’t originally make the final table. In the case of the Monte Carlo Millions, this gained John Juanda a seat at the final table.
But besides being a great tour to play in, the NAPT’s ultimate goal is to use the structure of the North American Poker Tour to change poker from a game into a sport. Modelling the tour after the PGA, Mézey believes that he can change the future of poker. “Our goal is to change the way that poker’s looked at by making it more of a sport: focusing on the skill and how difficult it is to actually be a professional poker player.” And judging by the talent he has on board, the thought he has put into this project, and the support he is receiving from the poker community, the NAPT is well on its way to making an indelible mark on the history of poker.
MATT SAVAGE:
“The overall vision of the NAPT is for players to be
part owners of the tour and give them a voice in the
decisionmaking process; to promote the game of poker
and make and create stars that will represent the tour
in a professional manner; to create fair equitable structures
that will be a true test of poker skill; and to become
the first true tour, as players will have to qualify
(by being in the Top 200 of the Bluff and Card Player
rankings) or win their way into the main event.”
