You’ve been served your amuse-bouche, a fun sized canapé and complimentary starter, now get ready for the main course. I hope you’ve left room.
Yes, while EPT Live returned to the air on Tuesday and James Hartigan and the team have already bought you undercover work watchers heart-stopping moments from both the €50,000 Super High Roller and Estrellas Main Event final tables, today is when the meat of the action gets under way.
From 3pm local time today, until whenever the Main Event wraps up on Wednesday August 27th – or more likely the early hours of Thursday – the EPT Live team will be bringing you uninterrupted coverage of the action from the 100th EPT Main Event. They’ll be somewhere in the region of 50 hours coverage to keep you amused during today, the weekend and into the next working week.
If you were an avid watcher last season you can expect the regulars to return to keep you warm like a safety blanket. Joe Stapleton will be putting himself on the line once more with “Challenge Stapes”. Indeed you’ve missed the vote for the first one of the season. Stapes has been challenged to sell sand on Barcelona beach and you can see the results during the final table on Wednesday.
If you stand still though you’ll get caught so expect innovations and more giveaways too. Chief among these is the EPTLive League. During every webcast in Season 11 there will be daily freerolls – most with money added – in which players can earn leader board points. The top players from each stop will win tickets to real money tournaments on PokerStars and the overall Season 11 winner will receive a major prize. You can find out all about the particulars on this dedicated page and get the password for the daily tournaments by tuning in to the webcast or following @EPTLive on Twitter.
And, given that much of the poker world is hyper competitive, the team will be keeping you sated with a #EPT100 quiz, giving viewers the chance to win a pair of headphones from Skullcandy, the Official Audio Partner of EPT Season 11.
And while James Hartigan, Joe Stapleton, Matt Broughton, Marc Convey and a rotating cast of poker experts will be the front men of the operation around 20-25 members of staff are part of each webcast there’s a whole cast and crew behind the scenes making sure things run smoothly.
One of those unsung heroes is Justyna Baran, who for the past two years in her TV production role has been a vital cog in making the webcast run smoothly. “We receive 5,000 – 6,000 #EPTLive tweets over the course of an event,” she tells the PokerStars Blog shortly before the show goes live today. “There’s also lots of people who commentate remotely as the webcast is broadcast in 14 different languages, with Czech being an addition for Season 11 and more planned in the future.”
Baran is a font of knowledge when it comes to webcast stats: “We average 210,000 unique viewers a day and the average length a viewer watches for is 48 minutes,” the most popular moment from last season is a no brainer though. “When Victoria Coren-Mitchell won her second EPT we had a lot of first time viewers.”
The most crucial remote member of the team though is you the viewers as the show doesn’t work without you getting involved. The easiest way to do that is by tweeting using #EPTLive during the webcasts. It’d be rude not to.
Follow all the action from the tournament floor on the main EPT Barcelona page. There’s hand-by-hand coverage in the panel at the top, including chip counts, and feature pieces below.
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