Hypothetical Question

I'm curious as to your feedback. Apologies for the long post, but I want to give all the details I can:

I work for a company that will be launching an online poker site in 2006. But I’m not shilling for either this site or for the tournament described below in this posting. I’d like to lay out a scenario I’ve never seen in the poker space before and I’d like to see everyone’s reaction to this.

A new poker tour in Canada will be hosting a casino tournament in a major Canadian city next year. It will have a $250,000 guaranteed first place prize and a $125,000 guaranteed second place prize (rubber-stamped by the province’s Lottery corporation) and only has 128 seats (heads-up shoot out format, NL Hold’em). Pays down to 17 spots I believe. (This event will be televised in Canada sometime after the tournament takes place.) A seat in this tournament can be purchased for $5,000 but our site will be partnering with the tournament to enable players to qualify online. Our site will be awarding 10-20 tournament packages (valued at $10K each, including the $5K registration fee, flights, cash, hotel, limo, entertainment, etc.) The online tournaments that determine the winners of these packages will be held on our site during the 30 days leading up to the tournament.

Here are the details of the online tournaments:

1) Each satellite tournament has a 128-player maximum (similar to the live event). First come, first serve. Single table (heads-up) play. ~$70 registers you. Winner gets the $10K package. Roughly 5 tournaments per week (maximum 1 daily).

2) Registration via Neteller deposit only. Once registration opens, players will be able to bring cash up from their Neteller account and transfer the $70 as confirmation of their intention to register for the tournament. The first 128 players to do so will be the participants for that day's (the next) event.

3) A single table online tournament (heads up) will also be available for play money (so people can test the site out). S&G format. No other tournaments or ring games will be available. After all the packages have been awarded, the poker site will go dark again to prepare for the full launch that will be unveiled shortly thereafter.

So here's the question that you can help us with. Given the description above, would these online tournaments interest you? Assuming that you have played (or have considered playing) in a satellite tournament that offers a seat/package for a casino tournament, how likely would you be to register online for this one? If this is something that you would sign up for, could you let us know why? Alternatively, if you wouldn't be interested, please communicate those reasons as well.

This is the setting in which we expect to get the most genuine feedback about our (and others' offerings). Many thanks for your time.

Douglas

Let me add a poll to this just for ease of use...

[Benholio]

I voted no.

Pretty much every online pokerroom has similar satellites running, so you are going to need something extra to get people to go out of their way to play this tournament at an unknown site with no other games going, no deposit bonus, etc. Either a big overlay ($35 buy-in), some kind of bonus perks for participants that would carry over to the opening of the cardroom, or something along those lines.