Millionare Chess Tournament in Las Vegas at October 2014

Will he be publishing a list of entrants in the run up to the event?

Is Ron Jeremy joining the said tourney? :)

to do what?

Shove bishops before knights...:)

NOT!

http://www.chesskid.com/article/view/knights-before-bishops

Oh...well... not those bishops. :)

Why do you or I care? We need to know if the value he is proposing is worth the registration fee and the travel expenses etc. He never claimed it to be a charity!

Lets say he is making an insane amount of money off this. If he really cares about the future of chess, he would accept a paycut to make the entry fee more realistic... So more people could play. The issue is not the tournament itself. it is a great idea. The problem is the entry fee. You would be better of buying $1000 worth of lottery tickets. 

A fool has right to make his money vanish as he pleases... Let him play chess.

If you want to create a "millionaire's tournament", you need to pay for it. In chess, with limited sponsorship, the way to do it is with entry fees. If you don't like the entry fee, you don't have to pay for it. But don't expect an "millionaire's" prize fund with a $50 entry fee. 

Traditionally, the tournament directors get paid "4th place" money. Basically, whatever a tnmt offers to the 4th place is similar to what the TD gets.

The people sponsoring the big events are assuming a tremendous risk by investing so much in this tournament. USCF requires tournaments to guarantee a portion of the prize fund even if nobody shows up. So, with the risk, it makes sense that sponsors should stand to make a profit.

That's how markets work.

they probably need at least 1500 entrants to break even given that it is a guaranteed prize fund.  plus there are $1,000 prizes for beating top 5 in each section in some(?) rounds and the tiebreak prizes also after round 7.  so if they give 1.1 million in money prizes, 1100 players would be 100% return of entries, which is a much better rate of return than normal.  if 1500 players, a 73.3% rate of return is much better than what is given at CCA events.  plus the costs of organization, costs for use of hotel, early bird discounts, etc are something.  its the organizers who are taking the risks here.

i might play but it's one of those situations that i don't fancy my chances in the open --- to compete for the same prizes as Magnus Carlsen, if he would play.  it's not ideal to play players 500+ pts above your rating if concerned about performance xD.

Seeing the turn of the conversation, I need to repost this.

Yes, the entry fee and the prize fund are magnified by a factor 10 or 100 compared to usual tournaments. But that's not a fundamental problem.

I'm hoping Ashley makes a bundle! Of course, the math is not in his favor, and he'll be lucky if he breaks even. But if Ashley makes a ton of money on this tournament, it will mean more tournaments like it, and perhaps even some with slightly smaller entry fees and similar prize funds. 

I expect that he will lose money on the venture.

The thing is, do you require that kind of transparency of any other tournament director? Do you think the CCA needs to publish all their profits and how much their TDs make?

If he is able to attract 1500 players then there is $500,000 left to play with, after prizes, that have to go towards site rental fees, paying TDs and other tournament staff, marketing costs, etc. Unless he pulls a lot more than 1,500 players, he isn't going to be keeping anywhere near 50% of the pool.

While I have had players ask me where the money goes when running a tournament before (when I ran an event with a prize fund of "at least 50% of entries"), I don't think that is something that most players worry about much. That said, $1,000 is too much for me for a tournament (at this time) so I won't be attending :D

Totally agree!

.... and who is compelling us to join that wrestling? Its just another option added in the free / competitive market. You dont have to stay in Burj-Al-Arab for $5000 per night or so. But that doesn't mean they never should have built Burj-Al-Arab. Whoever wants to pay the amount, let them go and stay there, have fun and pay the money.

For chess world, we need more options that what is there right now in the market. So any such initiative, expensive or not, should be welcome from the chess community.

Again...

Whoever is foolish enough to put his money in that tournament gets my benediction. It can only make him less susceptible to afford for children and will improve the gene pool, in addition to my ethical well-being of letting people do as they please.

However, do not expect me to support (ie cheer for) that tournament.

If people want to jump off a cliff, fine, let them do it. But I will not welcome cliff-jumping as a great addition to sports, and I will certainly fight cliff-jumping becoming a standard alternative to parachute jump.

IronTiger. You have a point. It's a free country, and you can choose to not support as well as choose to campaign against this so called cliff-jumping. However, I dont think its as bad as you are assuming for most of the chess players. So people like me will keep supporting the event and I am expecting the event to succeed despite all the skepticism that are and will be happening until the tournament is over. The chess community has to choose their fate picking one of theese 2 sides.

I'm surprised they're only waiting until the end of March to see if they have 1500. Don't most big tournaments get the majority of their entrants right before the tournament starts? Heck, it's not until when, October?

The problem is none knows for sure what the two sides are made of.

One side (minor prize funds, small tournaments,etc.) is about as catchy as professional stamp collecting. OK, that might turn into something different, but that's what it is now.

I have serious reasons to believe the other side is not poker as it is sold (ie stars, huge security checks, huge money in the game, press, etc.) but wrestling (ie poker, plus routinely rigged matches).

I don't know what you mean by "succeed". There will probably be enough people for it to have place - is that success ? There will probably (in my view) be rigging and scandals that will attract the press to chess - is that success ?

There are two reasons I posted in this thread. One is to warn potential players unaware of how the rules are made. The second is to row away from poker deeper into stamp collecting. I do not believe the second to be even close to being as important as the first.