APAT Silly Season has begunYes folks, it"s that time of year. No more events in the schedule, everyone is speculating as to how, when, what will be in the season 5 announcement. The "s" word gets used on a regular basis, but no one is any the wiser. As Des has posted on another thread
I love this post the day after Season 4 finished! I would be tempted to say at this stage that the first live event of S5 will be at the end of March and we won"t be announcing details of the season until the end of this month. There is a lot of work to be done now so let the team get on and do it. Remember S4 was far more challenging that S3 so there hasn"t been the same amount of time for us to finalise S5 yet.
February will be a month of planning, and hopefully we will be able to get details out at the end of the month. It works from the top down with APAT, well in that until the headline deal has been finalised, we cannot push the buttons on the venues, satellites, leagues etc.
Luckily, we have the best man for the job to get this done. It"s Mr Duffy"s territory when it comes to negotiations, and trust me, you want to be on his side.
We"ve been very fortunate in the past years, with some very generous sponsorship deals. Previous to Betfair Poker we had two great years with Blue Square. In my opinion, we"ve been spoilt in the last twelve months though, the added value that Betfair have offered to the players has simply been amazing.
But costs go up, and times are tough. We are in a credit crunching recession after all.
To start with, there"s the insurance premium on Maylis" wardrobe. We may have lowballed the cost to the insurance company last year, but since her profile has risen, we"re going to have to come clean about exactly how many outfits and pairs of shoes she actually transports to each event.
Then there"s the player appearance money for our celebrity players. Gone are the days when you could pay for a particular player and get a few thrown in for free. Brian Yates doesn"t seem to understand "recession". We used to book Max McKinlay and we"d get an appearance from Matt thrown in. The best deal we ever got was when we booked Steve Redfern and got Andy Overton, Will Young and Tony Trippier into the bargain. I"ll be honest, Brian was struggling to give Trippier away at that time. And as for the main man himself, well the real reason why he didn"t captain the BCPC in Bolton was actually because we just didn"t have enough budget left, so he took a gig in Florida instead.
To be honest, the weather and pay was much better than Bolton.
We still have issues with the venues. You may be surprised to hear that not every venue in the country are welcoming towards an APAT weekend. Usual questions surround "Will Chezger be attending ?". We try and give a diplomatic answer to that one. Then there was the time Tighty tried to book a venue in Leeds for an event. That didn"t go well as the casino were aware of Scouse, and apparantely last time he played there, they got complaints from residents in Bradford.
But, we crack on making plans, looking to make improvements to the tour and structures, whilst reading all the comments from members about what they would like to see.
It"s really great that players are so enthusiastic towards APAT. It really does make it all worthwhile.
Right, I"ve got some pokerz to play.
