As APAT prepare to annouce further season six details towards the end of this week, there are still a few decisions that we have yet to finalise. I"m going to share these with you as they are very important and your feedback could tip the balance one way or another.
1) Registration Fee
Whether to add a registration fee is the single biggest decision facing APAT at the moment.
APAT has paid the registration fee of every player who has played a live Championship event with us over the past five years and I said earlier in this thread, that"s something that I"m very proud of. However, the poker market is going through a very challenging time right now. There is also a wealth of live options available to poker budget holders, who can often acquire players more competitively through google search campaigns and signup offers.
As the owner of the APAT budget, I found myself in the strange position last year of wanting to run smaller tournaments later in the season to ensure we were able to make our budget work as hard as we could. This is a conflicting position, because in requiring smaller number tournaments, we end up not promoting the events to our membership as a whole and clearly that"s a viscious circle we need to get out of.
The addition of a 10% registration fee - which would go in its entirity to the venue to cover their costs - would enable us to promote our events hard again, and I feel that it is essential that we get back in growth mode.
What do you guys think, because if we go ahead with a reg fee, ultimately it"s going to cost you money when you play?
2) Scheduling
For the past two seasons in particular, APAT has run a National Live event every month. In my opinion it"s too much.
I think it must be challenging for so many of our members to be able to travel and play on a monthly basis and similarly it is difficult to effectively promote as there is too much going to between the live events, online championship events, online league, not to mention satellites and direct buy in events.
My view is that we should go to a Festival style weekend once every two months. That gives us more time to run satellites and promote the events hard. Over the festival weekend, I can see us having the Online Championship event on the Thursday night, a member get together on the Friday night, the main event over Saturday and Sunday, a live event on Saturday night, a live event on Sunday afternoon and a one table Cash Tour event over the weekend also.
3) Winners packages
We"ve offered live professional event entries to all of our winners for the past five years. An idea that we are considering is to offer the winner of every live and online event this year a World Championship of Amateur Poker passport, offering the main event and three side event entries. Although the value of this prize may be a little less than a Genting entry for example, it feels like a great idea to me to have every Amateur and Online Champion together at the WCOAP, where we can also add the Awards night, and create something really huge. What do you guys think?
