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PokerStars’ Neil Johnson About the EPT Now Paying Out 20 Percent of the Field
- Updated: August 21, 2016
Season 13 of the PokerStars European Poker Tour has kicked off in Barcelona with a hugely popular Estrellas Main Event and a €10,000 event. Yesterday, the €50,000 Super High Roller has started with a slate of familiar faces.
One of the big changes this season is the announced new payout structure that pays 20 percent of the field, compared to the 15 percent it paid in recent years.
We spoke to PokerStars Department Head of Live Poker Operations Neil Johnson about the change and its implications.
How did the European Poker Tour and PokerStars come to this decision? We did a lot of research over the summer. We looked at the players, the player base, the overall tour, everything.
One of the interesting statistics we found is that 46 percent of the players on EPT Season 12, played only 1 or 2 events. The whole point, the reason why we have 100 events at a festival, is because we want people to be able to play as many as they can. That’s why we have the $100 and $200 events for example; because we want people to be able to play more and have more fun.
One of the things that came up was looking at the payouts. One of the interesting things in our industry is that it has grown very organically over its history. The payouts have thus grown the same way, from winner-take-all to 5 percent, to 10 percent and 15 percent.
We started looking at the payouts in a vacuum and to see what made sense. We took all the preconceptions out of it. We saw that if we would pay out 20 percent instead of 15 percent, we could give 5 percent of the field a do-over. It’s effectively like saying ‘Thanks for coming, I hope you had a lot of fun. Sorry you didn’t make it into the big money, good luck the next time because here’s money for another shot.” If someone has a buy-in to play another poker tournament, that’s a good thing. So that’s the direction we ended up going.
Have you done a survey amongst EPT players? Before the start of Season 10, the last time we changed the pay-outs, we did a big survey. We had 1,600 responses to the question which pay-out percentage they wanted. The options were 10 percent, 12.5 percent, and 15 percent, and all three of them got 33 percent of the votes. Whatever we did, 66 percent was going to be angry. We did what we thought was in the best interest of the poker economy at that time.
This time, we ran all the data we had and decided again to do what we thought was in the best interest of the poker economy and poker players. We’ve done what we think was the right thing to do.
Is this a try-out, or is this a definitive decision? We’re doing it for the 2016 portion of EPT season 13; Barcelona, Malta and Prague. We really want to give it a solid run. It’s like 200 tournaments and this way we will be really able to take a good look at it, and get the feedback from the players. This ultimately is a player driven industry and if the overwhelming feedback is that players love it, hate it, or want it tweaked, we’ll certainly go back and look at it. But it will be in place for these 3 events.
Super High Roller regular Steve O’Dwyer talking to Neil Johnson about the changes
Does the decision come from the ever growing field sizes in live events? You have these massive small buy-in events where thousands of people sign up. Take for example the opening WSOP circuit events and the Colossus or our PokerStars Cup events. People are paying something like $300 and play huge prize pools, but a lot of money is never flowing back into the poker economy.
Let’s say first gets $200,000 in a $300 buy-in event. That’s great and amazing for that player. $197,000 of that is probably leaving the poker economy forever though. A $300 player is not going to become a $2,000 player overnight. That’s just not how progression works in poker. Let’s say we now make first place prize $175,000, that’s still a huge number of times their buy-in and still life changing money. You take that $25,000 and pay out a lot of people at the bottom, and give them all another bullet to become that $175,000 winner in one of the other events.
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