The Epic Poker League has gained a good bit of attention in the past few months, both for good and bad reasons. The prize pools have been huge, and the tournaments involve the biggest names in poker as well. The bad reasons for all of the attention is the drama that has surrounded their first two events. While many people find the idea of the EPL interesting and exciting, the tournament just isn’t for everyone. Some people feel that the International Stadiums Poker Tour was created to put a fight against the Epic Poker League. While both tournaments seem like very good ideas, they aim to hit different types of players completely. The EPL is currently running, while the ISPT will kick off early in 2012. We’re going to take a look at a few ways that these two tournaments are so different.
First off, the ISPT is one of those tournaments that was created for any poker player out there. Take their estimations on how many players they expect, which is set at more than 20,000. This is literally the complete opposite of what the EPL is looking for, as they only allow certain players to play, and really never feature events that have more than 300 total players. This is one way that ISPT has gained poker players’ attention more than the EPL has.
While the EPL’s first event featured a $1 million prize to the winner, the ISPT is hoping that their first place prize can get in the upwards of $10 million. This alone would draw quite a bit of attention, and is once again an opposite of the Epic Poker League. You can bet that the creators of the ISPT watched the Epic Poker League and how everything was ran, and made sure to keep their horizons open as to the number of players they will allow, and how large the tournaments will be. The ISPT is looking to complete change the way that poker is played, with their combination play between online poker (with pads in the stadiums that they play in), and then live table play on the actual field itself.
It is unknown if the ISPT was created to directly compete with the EPL, but it seems that they are attempting to come at the poker world in a completely different way than anyone has ever seen.