Next week’s European Poker Tour (EPT) event in Barcelona marks 20 years since the EPT’s debut. The first ever EPT tournament was also held in the Catalan capital, and plans are afoot to celebrate in style.
To honor the occasion we took the opportunity to talk with the tour’s founder, John Duthie. A TV director in his native UK, Duthie first made waves in the poker world with his £1M win in the inaugural Poker Million tournament in 2000.
“I think I first went to Vegas in 1997,” Duthie tells us, “I hadn't really played any hold’em, most of the most of my successes or failures were in 7-card-stud, playing cash at the Vic [the Victoria Casino in London].
“I just loved the game, I just really enjoyed it and I'd stopped drinking, so I needed something else to do.”
As creator, executive producer and even commentator of the EPT, it would prove to be a while before Duthie would need something else to occupy his time.
‘There was never any doubt it was going to succeed’
“I think anybody with any sort of understanding of where poker was played could have set this up,” says Duthie. “Everybody wanted it to work. It took a lot of hard work but there was never any doubt it was going to succeed.”
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the gap which the EPT filled, providing an exciting live poker tour for players outside the game’s traditional US home. But while Duthie may have not been the only one to recognize the opportunity, he was particularly well-suited to the job of bringing the idea to life.
As a TV director who played poker, Duthie had connections in both worlds, which would prove to be key in getting the EPT off the ground.
“I'd seen the WPT that started in America,” Duthie recalls. “They considered themselves the so-called ‘world’ poker tour but they only had one stop outside of America, in Paris. I'd been playing poker for a few years; I knew some of the venues and had traveled around Europe playing. I just thought, because of my TV experience, why don't I give it a shot?”
Duthie identified three essential partnerships required for the EPT to work: venues, a TV production company and a route for online qualification.
Step 1: Venues
The first step was getting the venues on board, and as a regular at London’s Victoria Casino that was the obvious place to start. “I met with Grosvenor and they agreed to sign up for the first year. Once they’d agreed, it was just a question of going around the rest of Europe trying to get the other places.”
A conversation with the Merrion Casino Club in Ireland, where Duthie had also spent some time at the tables, saw EPT Dublin added to the schedule, followed by a successful meeting with Casinos Austria which saw EPT Vienna join the tour. It turned out Casinos Austria had an international branch with a casino in Denmark, and so EPT Copenhagen was quickly added.
Before long, a calendar of seven international stops across Europe was drawn up for season 1, running from September 2004 to March 2005.
Step 2: Production
TV production was the next hurdle to leap, and Duthie leaned on his industry background to find a solution.
“I first went to Mersey Television,” says Duthie, “because I was doing a lot of work with them and I was friends with a producer up there. But then I realized I needed someone with outside broadcast experience.” That brought Duthie into contact with the production company Sunset + Vine, a UK-based outfit which specializes in sports, and a producer there by the name of Francine Watson.
Watson produced the first EPT broadcasts and has stayed with the tour ever since, moving to PokerStars where she was nominated as ‘Industry Person of the Year’ at the 2024 GPI Awards. When she accepted the GPI Award for ‘Best Live Stream’ for PokerStars Live, it was as someone who had been involved with it from the very start.
Speaking of PokerStars, the EPT is inextricably linked with the online operator, but that wasn’t always the plan.
Step 3: The online partner
“PokerStars were never going to be the overall sponsor,” explains Duthie, “They were just going to sponsor one event, because I didn't want one side to have too much control. Everybody was on board. UltimateBet were going to do an event, another operator was going to do a cruise. There were a lot of online sites around the time who really wanted to do an individual event.”
So how did PokerStars become so integral to the EPT?
“Obviously I was aware of PokerStars,” Duthie continues. ”I was mainly dealing with other sites… I ended up in an unrelated meeting with [PokerStars co-founder] Isai Scheinberg about the potential launch of a poker TV channel, and then after that conversation ended, Isai wanted to talk. And it was during that conversation with him that I realized it was going to be so much easier just to have one sponsor.”
Timing was also a factor. “This was in, like, August or late July 2004, and Barcelona was due to be in September and we were getting closer and closer and closer. It wasn't really coming together and the people with the money weren’t coming together, and obviously Sunset + Vine needed a lot of assurances if they were going to do it.
“It was at that point that I thought it's going to be much easier to just have PokerStars as headline sponsor for the whole tour, and so we talked about it, we negotiated, and they agreed to cover the first year's production costs in return for all the branding. It really just made things so much easier, and it meant that I could get going in September and really start the series.”
‘He actually got stabbed at that event’
When we ask Duthie for some of his best stories from his time with the EPT, one of his most cherished memories is also one of the earliest.
“I made the mistake of having a free bar at Dublin for the first event. That was a really stupid decision. People were coming in off the streets and getting drunk on the bleachers and fighting. Padraig [Parkinson] was just drunk on his back, lying on a bench. It was really, really good fun; hard work, but good fun.”
Then there’s the incident where Jason Mercier won the EPT Main Event and got stabbed the same night. Perhaps not one of Duthie’s favorite memories, but one that certainly sticks in the memory.
“A lot of online players were suddenly coming to live events in Europe from America,” Duthie remembers, “and they were meeting people they hadn't played with other than online. It was great seeing an American player like Jason Mercier come to San Remo and suddenly meeting loads of people he played with online, it was good fun.
“Mind you, he actually got stabbed at that event - the one he won. Him and his friends went out celebrating afterwards and got into a big fight with some local Italian kids. I went to see him in hospital to look after him, and somehow kept it out of the headlines!”
When it comes to the players that have left their mark, Duthie prefers those who were willing to let their character shine through.
“Nobody wants to watch eight automatons playing poker, they want characters. People like Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak capitalized on that amazingly, really, because they’re both quite nitty players, but what they were was really good entertainers. Marcel Luske, Devilfish, Tony G… those sorts of characters are great for television. I love Jake Cody, Steve Warburton, all the great Sandinavian players like Johnny Lodden, William Thorson… these are great characters, we had so much fun.”
Duthie is planning on attending the festivities when the birthday candles are lit in Barcelona next week.
“The whole EPT thing was great and I really enjoyed it. I feel fairly detached from it now but it's something I'll always be proud of. I'll go to Barcelona and I'll play and hopefully cash and I'll enjoy it. I don't think I would have ever done it for 20 years anyway, because I'm a great believer in reinventing yourself every 5 years, I think it's important to always keep looking forward.”
Images courtesy of Rational Intellectual Holdings/PokerStars Live/Danny Maxwell Photography/Joe Giron/Tomas Stacha/Eloy Cabacas/PokerGO
