After a week of 12-plus hour days grinding away at the felt in the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, the 2019 World Series of Poker Main Event has come down to n. Poker Discover offers online search for live poker cash games & tournaments according to towns and countries. All the poker clubs around the world are collected together on pokerdiscover.com, along with the info about the international poker series, recent news and local poker clubs’ tweets.

Last weekend, the Sky Poker Tour came to Brighton for its fourth tour stop this year – hosted by Rendezvous Casino, which sits in the heart of Brighton Marina.

Sky Poker Tour Brighton 2019 2020

With Sky Poker recently being acquired by the Stars Group within the last year, I was pleasantly surprised to see Sky announce a new tour this year and looked forward to playing the Brighton Leg.

Here are the numbers for this year’s Sky Poker Tour – Brighton:

Buy-in: £200+20
425 entries (including re-entries)
£85,000 prize pool (£50,000 Guaranteed)
Min-cash: £510
First place: £18,300

Structure

Sky Poker Tour offers a generous structure for a fairly low buy-in event. With a 40-minute clock and just 10% rake, it’s hard to find a better value poker tournament for a £220 buy-in. With starting blinds of 25/50 and a 25,000 chip starting stack, there was a wealth of deep play to be had and plenty of poker for your money.

Sky Poker Brighton 2019

Atmosphere

This is the second year running that I have attended the Brighton Leg of the Sky Poker Tour. Although very similar, this year the atmosphere felt a little off. A little anti-climatic.
On the face of it, Sky seemed to get it all right: great venue, great branding, great guarantee. But it all just fell a bit flat. All announcements made by Sky or tournament staff were done by voice (without the aid of a microphone) and therefore barely heard by players and screens displaying the structure of the tournament gave no indication of when the breaks would occur until it was time for a break.
Even those keen-eyed folk who had read the tournament structure beforehand weren’t helped by the omission of a level from Day 1A to Day 1B.
I know these were small issues, but when the structure isn’t clear and you can’t hear what the tournament director is saying, it really brings down the professionalism of an event.

Venue

Rendezvous Casino Brighton is blessed with space. The entire bottom floor of the casino is dedicated to poker, a rarity in British casinos these days.

With Sky Poker branding displayed around the poker room and their own branded chips and tables, this tournament had the professional set-up that you would expect from Sky.

One issue with the poker room was that, during the breaks, staff allowed players to stay in the room. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough space in the room to have players hanging around on breaks and I felt that at times, players were a little to close to the poker tables which all still had chips on. I think that the poker room either needed closing during breaks or at least some partitioning so that players couldn’t wonder around the tables.

Staff

Overall, I was very impressed by the staff at the Rendezvous Casino. There were plenty of Valets and the Dealers were friendly, good-humoured and professional. There was some concern on our table where we had to convince the dealer to call the floor after a player blatantly got up and left the room on his big blind, but other than a few small snags, they did a great job.
While it was a Sky Poker event, Rendezvous Casino ran the show with little input from Sky staff and I couldn’t help thinking that other than it being a ‘Sky Poker’ branded event, Sky didn’t really bring anything extra to the party.

Altogether, the Sky Poker Tour was an enjoyable event but to me, it just felt like it was missing something. Maybe I’ll be able to have a better idea of what that something was when I head back to Rendezvous Brighton to play the UniBet UK Poker Tour later in the year.

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