The 2014 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure is hitting its peak today, the sixth of nine days on the schedule for its 11th annual installment. Day 3 of the Main Event will kick off at noon and the seat draw for the last 230-some-odd players shows a tournament filled with past PCA winners, WSOP bracelet winners, November Niners, world champions, and players who have otherwise made a name for themselves in the crowded world of live tournament poker. For those who busted on the first two days of the main event (or never bothered to play it) there are still another 19 events to be played – and for everyone there’s a major party on the penultimate night, highlighting what has been a great start to the PCA’s second decade.
The festival, which began its history on a cruise ship in 2004 as a stop on the World Poker Tour, has seen its fortunes dictated in large part by U.S. federal legislation. Despite that it has grown to outstrip the tour that launched it and become one of the world’s premier live poker tournament festivals. While television played a large role in getting people to play poker on the internet back in 2003, it was really cheap online satellites at poker rooms across the internet that provided the biggest impetus for the growth of a worldwide live tournament circuit over the next three years. The WPT was a major beneficiary of this, but with most of its stops being in the U.S., the tour’s management chose to stop accepting online satellite qualifiers after UIGEA passed in 2006. PokerStars, which had launched the PCA on a cruise ship in 2005 before bringing poker to the Bahamas in 2006 as a WPT sponsor, opted to continue with business as usual. That meant severing its affiliation with the WPT, which at the time was still the only major poker tournament series in the world outside the WSOP.
Going it alone let the PCA continue to grow while most of the WPT’s stops went into attendance freefall. As WPT partners pulled out of the U.S. and stopped accepting American satellite qualifiers, some of the events back in the States began shrinking and falling off the tour’s schedule altogether. Meanwhile, PokerStars became the world’s online market leader and the PCA main event continued to grow. It drew more than 1,000 players for the first time in just its fifth year (2008) and attracted more than 1,300 for each of the three years leading up to Black Friday. The side event schedule began modestly with a few NLHE tournaments with smaller buy-ins before adding a $25,000 High Roller event in 2009 and exploding in 2010 into 37 events across 11 different poker disciplines. In the years since then the PCA has continued to give players what they want, introducing new events (like last year’s Open Face Chinese Poker tournament, the world’s first) and offering a wide range of buy-ins to keep everybody in action for the entire nine-day schedule.
As for the PCA’s main event, its attendance peaked with 1,560 players back in 2011, the second straight year that it had drawn more than 1,500; at its height it awarded the winner a prize of $3,000,000, one of the largest in the world outside high-roller tourneys and the WSOP Main Event. Then came Black Friday, and the next year’s field dropped by a third to 1,072. After just 987 showed up last year, Stars responded by posting a $10 million guaranteed prize pool for the 2014 event. It was a strong statement for the start of the PCA’s second decade, being that it was only the second such guarantee in tournament history after last year’s Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open main event. Even with a buy-in that remains $10,000 in a time of declining entry fees and a polar vortex slowing travel across North America to a crawl, the final tally of 1,031 was enough to eclipse that massive guarantee. Whoever walks away with the top prize this year will win more than $1.8 million, far from an insignificant sum in today’s poker economy.
It’s a good sign for the health of the PCA that the main event beat its guarantee to kick off its second decade. The tournament’s reputation was made in an era dominated by the American market, which after Black Friday simply isn’t available the way it used to be. Reversing the downward trend of the last two years promises this great tournament won’t fade away like others did in the late 2000s. But it’s also a good sign for the growth of live tournament poker in general. If the PCA can grow without American satellite qualifiers, an American-based series like the WSOP, which will once again have access to them this year in Nevada and New Jersey, should be able to begin bumping its attendance numbers back upward as well. If online legalization continues to spread over the coming years and smaller tours like the WSOP Circuit or Heartland Poker Tour were to begin qualifying players online, there’s no telling how much the poker economy could grow. Should PokerStars ever be allowed back into the United States market, American players without enormous bankrolls will once again get to experience this world-class festival for themselves. But even if Stars remains locked out, the PCA will stand as an example of how to do a festival right with its big fields, variety in games and buy-ins, and constant action.
