A Look at the PokerStars.net NAPT's First Season, Part III
With the start of the second season of the PokerStars.net North American Poker Tour just around the corner, PokerNews is here once again to talk about the success of the first season. This time around, we’ll be looking at how the NAPT compared to the other popular and prominent PokerStars-sponsored tours. Specifically, the NAPT will be compared to the big three of PokerStars: the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, the Latin American Poker Tour and the European Poker Tour.
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Today, the EPT is one of the largest and most successful poker tours not just in Europe, but also around the world. The fields get hundreds and hundreds of players with millions upon millions being shelled out in prize money over many stops year round. It’s certainly a great benchmark for the NAPT to attain, but that’s not how it’s always been for the EPT.
The EPT had its first season in 2004 and the average number of entrants per event was a room-filling 210 players. Although that number is plenty small when compared to the numbers the EPT puts up now, that’s still some pretty good-sized fields given the time period, average buy-in per event of €3,668 and European market. Still, the fields are nowhere near the numbers the NAPT had on its first season, which blew the EPT’s numbers out of the water. It was in fact a landslide with the NAPT drawing in over three and a half times the number of average entrants in the three events held in the United States.
Let’s take a look at how the first season of the NAPT compared to the three other big PokerStars-sponsored tours. Here are the numbers.
| Tour | Avg. Buy-in | Avg. Entrants | Avg. Prize Pool | Avg. 1st Place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPT (2004-2005) | €3,668 | 210.6 | €682,996 | €224,916 |
| APPT (2007) | $3,279 | 338.5 | $1,249,188 | $347,854 |
| LAPT (2008) | $2,700 | 354.3 | $867,108 | $246,259 |
| NAPT (2010) | $5,000 | 763 | $3,503,947 | $767,549 |
The numbers don’t lie, it’s the NAPT by a landslide, and those numbers shown above are without the 2010 PCA Main Event included in the equation. With that event included, those numbers grow a bit for the NAPT and separate it further from the rest of the pack.
Yes, it could be argued that the average prize pool and average first-place prize could be the result of the NAPT haaving had the largest average buy-in out of these four tours, but it crushed the other three for entrants with 763 players showing up on average. That number is massive and a testament to how successful the NAPT really was in its first season.
How large is the number of 763 entrants for the average field at an NAPT Main Event during the first season? Well, let’s take a look at some comparable events from this past summer’s World Series of Poker and see how the NAPT matched up.
| Event | Entrants | Prize Pool | 1st Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| $5,000 NLHE | 792 | $3,722,400 | $818,959 |
| $5,000 6-Handed NLHE | 568 | $2,669,600 | $667,433 |
| $2,500 Triple Chance NLHE | 965 | $2,663,400 | $559,371 |
| $2,500 NLHE | 1,942 | $4,466,600 | $825,976 |
The average for those events for field size was 1,066.8 players. That’s only about 300 more than the NAPT had on average, but when you include the 2010 PCA Main Event, the NAPT’s average jumps to 955, just over 100 players less of an average. The average prize pool for these events was $3,380,500. The NAPT without the 2010 PCA Main Event was $3,503,947, which is more than those WSOP events. The average first-place prize for those WSOP events was $717,935. That number, too, is less than the $767,549 average that the NAPT had in the three $5,000 events. Given that the WSOP is the benchmark for all poker events around the world, outdoing the WSOP in this arena is quite a feat accomplished by the NAPT, especially done in its first season.
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As if you couldn’t already tell, all of the numbers definitively point to the NAPT’s massive amount of success on the first season in the poker world. Given that this was the first go around for the tour and all other PokerStars-sponsored tours increased in their following years, the NAPT will surely follow the same pattern. It’s safe to project well over 800 players in every field next season and first-place prizes that near $1,000,000. We’ve received word that there’s already over 600 players signed up for the first event to kick off season two of the NAPT, the 2011 PCA Main Event. That’s a huge number already and a sign of the great things to come from the NAPT in the future.
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