Throwing Darts at the NAPT Map

Yesterday brought us the announcement of the long-awaited North American Poker Tour. When you consider that more than 1,500 played in this year's $10,000 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and the record fields that some of the EPT tournaments regularly attract, the NAPT seems primed for success. Stars can funnel players into these tournaments with online qualifiers -- players who, for whatever reason, have no desire to travel overseas in order to play in a big buy-in poker tournament.

Currently the only scheduled NAPT stops are the PCA (it's now an EPT, LAPT and NAPT stop, the championship of all championships), Las Vegas at the Venetian in February and Mohegan Sun in April. There's been lots of discussion of what other venues might be in the running.

Obviously there will be a few Canadian tournaments. This is the North American Poker Tour, after all, not the United States Poker Tour. Additionally PokerStars' global events head Jeffrey Haas hails from Toronto. Fallsview Casino, a former WPT stop, seems like a logical choice. The BC Champs at River Rock casino in Vancouver may also draw the NAPT's interest. River Rock boasts the largest poker room in Canada and the tournament is already attended by some pros -- Daniel Negreanu won the $2,000 Main Event in 2008, beating 688 other players.

In the U.S., the options after Venetian and Mohegan are murkier. The two major card rooms in L.A., the Commerce and the Bike, are locked up by WPT. Same goes with Bay101 further up the California coastline. None of the other options in California are all that appealing unless you like playing tent poker.

In the south, the Beau Rivage in Biloxi is also locked up by WPT, but Tunica is startlingly missing. Now, if you've never been to Tunica you don't know what a weird place it is. The weirdness is hard to describe. It's like the scene at the end of National Lampoon's Vacation when Clark Griswold and his family arrive at Wally World. They see an empty parking lot and Griswold mistakenly concludes that they are the first ones to arrive. He races his children across the parking lot to the park's front gate, only to find out that Wally World is closed. THAT is what Tunica feels like.

But still, at one time Tunica was a major U.S. poker destination. In early 2009 Pauly and Amy Calistri wrote complementary posts discussing how Tunica had fallen off the face of the U.S. poker map. It would seem that Tunica could be primed for a comeback with the NAPT -- but there are some problems.

First and foremost, the Horseshoe and the Grand (now re-branded Harrah's) are owned by Harrah's. Since Harrah's owns the WSOP, a brand in direct competition with the NAPT, and has designs for its own online poker brand, it seems likely that no Harrah's property will ever host an NAPT event.

The only other viable option in Tunica is the Gold Strike, owned by MGM. The Gold Strike formerly hosted the Jack Binion World Poker Open (Amy does a great job detailing how the Gold Strike wound up with a tournament brand that originated at the Horseshoe, now a Harrah's property) but moved that event to Biloxi in 2009 and re-branded it the Southern Poker Championship. The SPC is a WPT event, which may make MGM leery of bringing an NAPT event into Tunica to replace it so soon after deciding that the WPO was better off in Biloxi.

Atlantic City presents some similar difficulties. Once the Harrah's properties are removed from the equation, the two contenders left standing are the Borgata and the Taj Mahal. The Borgata, like the Gold Strike in Tunica, formerly was a WPT joint but broke away from the WPT for the 2009 Borgata Winter Open. It seems likely that TD Tab Duchateau believed that the Borgata no longer needed the WPT. The success of his deep-stack tournaments since breaking away from the WPT has borne out that belief.

The Taj Mahal hosts the U.S. Poker Championships every year in the early fall. This would seem to be a good match for the NAPT. It's a major poker tournament series, generally well-thought-of by pros; there are no competition issues, as with Harrah's properties; and the Taj lost a lot of its competition to the Borgata in the last five years since the Borgata opened and first associated itself with the WPT. Aligning with the NAPT and PokerStars would provide a huge boost for the Taj in its eternal battle with the Borgata for AC poker players.

There are some U.S. properties that could be considered dark horses for an NAPT stop (Casino Arizona comes to mind) but I wouldn't expect to see any tournaments outside of the destinations listed above. NAPT might look into a second Vegas stop but to where would it be held? Bellagio is out and all Harrah's properties are out. NAPT could theoretically partner with MGM, putting an event at the MGM Grand or the newly-opened Aria in City Center. The problem with an MGM stop in Vegas is that Bellagio is already locked up by WPT. Presumably the WPT would be none-too-pleased if MGM put an NAPT stop in one of its Vegas sister properties.

The only other non-affiliated casino with a decent poker room in Vegas is the Wynn, which runs an annual tournament series called the Wynn Classic. The problem with the Wynn Classic? It's held from late February to mid March, directly after the end of the Venetian's February Deep Stack Extravaganza -- now an NAPT event.

In the end this is all just a guessing game. The PokerStars live events team has some bright, talented people on staff who have been working to resolve many of these issues long before yesterday's announcement. We'll have to sit back and wait to see what they've come up with.

[Edited to add: When considering destinations for the NAPT, bear in mind the marketing strategy behind these events. What is being marketed is "destination poker". A location is a destination either because it's a major gambling destination (Tunica, AC), it's a major vacation destination (L.A., Vancouver) or it's both (Vegas). The reason the WSOP-C largely failed is because Harrah's didn't understand what they were marketing. They thought the WSOP brand would be enough to encourage people to go to remote locations like Council Bluffs and Rincon -- locations where there is absolutely nothing but the host casino. (And apologies to natives of the Detroit area, but Detroit is NOT a destination in any sense.)]