world poker tour shutting down?
So for the last couple of years the wpte has been losing money like crazy, will they shut down soon. I mean they were at 20$ a share when i started watching now they are well below a dollar. Whats going to happen
i know foxwoods has or had a wpt styled poker room and tables at one point. why cant they stay afloat?
I can only speculate, but maybe they've over extended themselves. They tried to move into the Chinese market, but everyone in the gaming industry tried to move into the Chinese market at the same time. They launched an online poker site. Does anyone here play at WorldPokerTour.com? The Cryptologic network isn't quite the biggest online poker network going (actually it's 18th). Meanwhile, the whole world's economy is in shambles, everyone's scared about where China may be headed, and there has to be an impact on tourism, hotel, and casino industry. That has to affect interest in watching poker on TV, if tourneys become smaller in the next year, and the viewer base may be jaded by years of nearly identical programming.
I hope WPT as a program can continue. But maybe the company needs to return their attention to the one product that has ever been profitable for them, and scale down their expansion. Perhaps someone else needs to buy the brand (as, for instance, we still have a World Series of Poker, but it's Harrahs, not Binions).