First I"ve heard of Stud not getting support. In fact, I know it"s not true from bitter experience. In 2015, I left work early and travelled from Portsmouth to Aspers for the Stud, but wasn"t allowed to play because the cap had been reached. Any lack of numbers for Stud has been due to the caps imposed.
On the other hand, there are several mixed-games players opposed to the inclusion of OFC. There is a vocal group who want it, but there are many who don"t like it and don"t think it has a place, especially at the expense of Stud or Razz (or even on its own merits).
I"m gonna rant here. It"s nothing personal.
Personally I don"t care what other comps are on offer. The fact is that outside home games, live fixed limit anything is extremely rare in the UK, and since it"s being offered here in HORSE and 8-game and has historically been offered in the past in the form of stud games and this tournament series is the only relatively cheap source I know of of fixed limit poker that the UK sees, I would hope the chance to make an effort to keep these dying/dead games from extinction might be taken.
Every single week I am promoting fixed limit poker to the people I meet in home games and live casinos here in Nottingham. All of them look at me with disgust and dubiety and simply don"t understand its appeal. They just want to go ALL IN or bet pot, play for stacks rather than bets, even if it takes more time to play hands and kills the poker economy. I would even go so far as to say that the prevalence of NL/PL poker has massively incentivised and accelerated the sharing of poker strategy (extremely bad for people who want to win in the long run), because nothing makes you scratch your head more in poker than losing your whole stack when justly bested by an opponent, wondering what you strategically did wrong and how you are going to make it better next time. Losing bet by bet, it"s no sweat. Onto the next hand, I"ll just keep doing what I"m doing because I"m still in the game with chips, I only lost a few bets, that doesn"t mean anything.
This second paragraph might seem off topic, but I think it has every relation to the essence of what APAT is. APAT as far as I can tell going by the name of it, "Amateur", is about grassroots poker and catering and promoting the game to recreational players. You might say that everyone pays the same buy-in, it"s not a cash game, so it doesn"t really matter what the betting structure is, but what is promoted in tournaments as we"ve seen since Moneymaker becomes cash games.
I take the point that it may not be viable for the schedule this year, though I do see on the schedule what appears to be 10th, 11th as possible points of allocations of slots for these comps I"m arguing for. Maybe the casino has other plans for those days.
I may be an oddity as a 29 years old with a penchant for poker games and betting structures "only 90 year olds play", but perhaps you will see what I have said and agree with its merits and promote making oddities like me more common.
I love fixed limit so much I travel from Nottingham every year to play the APAT!