Is It Too Early To Talk About The Classic's Future?

[Greg Ambrosius]

The Classic is my favorite event. It's the hardest event with the best competition. I feel like you could take a smaller rake. Before somebody gets on here and wants to talk about running a business I'll give you an idea to help with the money. Make your early bird special payment due when we commit to playing. You could make money off the interest for a couple months. Then don't offer another discount for people to sign up later. I found it offensive that you offer a huge discount to add another classic when I play by the rules and always take advantage of your discounts. We left 13k in our account to take advantage of the discounts to ultimately not even get the best deal. The Classic is for the guys that want the challenge of being the best.

I'm not trying to upset anyone with my answers, just being honest. Our "rake" was smaller than was expected this year since we sold only 252 teams when prizes were based on 280 teams. Anyone can do the math and realize there was little net revenue on the Classic this year.

Making interest on the early signups two months before we ask for payment would be minimal at best. Not worth it. I'd rather let our customers keep their money during that time.

When we hit 252 teams we did offer a lower discount to try and fill one more league. No need to feel offended when nobody signed up for that last league. Your discount was no less than what others got.

I agree: The Classic is for the guys who want the challenge of being the best. It's why we want to keep it alive and around. But having bigger overall prizes isn't helping the contest grow, so I ask again: How can we maintain 252 teams without continuing to lose owners each year?

I'm proposing bigger league prizes and a smaller grand prize pool. The majority of our respondents want a similar overall prize pool and similar league prize payout with a flattened overall prize structure. I'm still not convinced that keeps the Classic around beyond 2020. Again, someone convince me that's the answer and bigger league prizes aren't better for everyone. I'm looking for the perfect scenario to keep everyone coming back for more.

[Spaige52]

So don't guarantee the grand prize, base it on the amount of entries.

[Greg Ambrosius]

So don't guarantee the grand prize, base it on the amount of entries.

It’s not legal to do that per the UIEGA act.

[Cocktails and Dreams]

It seems as thought it is legal to base it on a conservative number and raise prizes accordingly though since you do that quite often. So why not just be a bit conservative on initial figure but make it know it will be raised.

[Greg Ambrosius]

It seems as thought it is legal to base it on a conservative number and raise prizes accordingly though since you do that quite often. So why not just be a bit conservative on initial figure but make it know it will be raised.

Correct, you can't change the advertised grand prize. We could easily be conservative with the 2nd through 10th overall prizes, but people make their decisions on those guaranteed prizes. We try to be as strong as we can be and do everything we can to sell out every contest, but it doesn't always work. For the Classic, I think 252 teams is a fair number to project and hopefully we can get to 280 again. If we can make people money with a new prize structure, hopefully the Classic can be strong again.