Back in 2013, the World Poker Tour decided that it was long overdue in joining the High Roller set. In fact, to be specific, the Super High Roller set.

The WPT Alpha8 tournament series was born. Nine events and two years later, the series ground to a halt, going out with a whimper, barely announced, yet high roller events seem to be more popular than ever before. So why didn’t Alpha8 work?

The buy-in was a whopping $100,000 (or in other countries’ currencies, £100,000 or €100,000, for example). That shouldn’t have put players off, however, and Season 1 visited Hollywood, London’s Park Lane, St. Kitts and Johannesburg in its quest to provide high rolling thrills to its players across four tournament stops.

Unfortunately, across those four events, they averaged less than 20 players per event, and Philipp Gruissem won back-to-back events in London and St. Kitts. It was great for the German poker legend, but in terms of advertising the opening season, the WPT would have loved four different faces to share. The 10-player Johannesburg event saw Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates win just $500,000.