[MicroBob]

California is the one Ben Affleck won last year if I recall correctly.

If you look on pokerpages.com you can see about a ZILLION different tourneys.
The EPT and other european tourneys too of course.


The saturation is significant.
I don't think it's going to be the 'death of poker' though.

some of the tourneys just will be less likely to survive.
But even in a 100 player field...are they really losing money on the event?
The dealers make minimum wage pretty much plus whatever is tipped (in the tourney as well as any side-games) and the floor and management make however much they make....and I assume they have the flexibility to send people home if they find they have an excess of personnel.


Also - if I recall correctly...Hellmuth mentioned in one his books that there was some big buy-in tournament at the Bike in 2000 or 2001 (pre TV boom) that got 12 players or something like that and then 2 or 3 years later that exact same tournament got 500 players.
Something close to those numbers anyway.


100 players doesn't sound like much but that's just because of the very large fields we get in some of the big one's these days.

5 years ago if you said that by 2005 we would have 25 or more tourneys every year of $5k-$10k buy-in and that each one would have AT LEAST 100 players and that some would have 300-600 players you would probably say "where on earth are all of those players with THAT much money going to come from?"
If I tossed-in the notion that the WSOP would have 45 total events including a main-event drawing almost 6k players and that there would also be a couple of events in the $15k and $25k range (Bellagio 5-diamond and WPT championship) and we would STILL get all the players to play the 25 'other' tourneys you would have said, 'Ummm....I don't think so retard. But I'd happily take a couple hits of whatever the hell it is you're smoking.'