The Hartland Poker Tour continues to flourish

What began as a series of events in the Midwest exploded into a full-fledged national poker tour, with televised coverage and a prize of up to $1 million at stake.

The Heartland Poker Tour (HPT) was first conceptualized by casual poker player Todd Anderson and his friend Greg Lang in 2005. At that time, poker boomed on TV, with both the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour staying maintained on cable TV.

“We’re just bemoaning the opportunity for players like us to play (on TV) is far away,” Anderson said. “So we just kind of put together a whole bunch of thinking, ‘Why isn’t there anything for us?'” he said. “Players like us who play on weekends and have fun. We have normal jobs and stuff like that.”

HPT’s original goal was to become a Minnesota poker tour with the hope of having six casinos in a 250-mile radius on board. Since then, Anderson has been optimistic that he will be able to air the tour on Fargo, Minneapolis, and Duluth TV stations. The show will focus on ordinary players, not poker superstars. So the tagline for HPT is “Real People, Unreal Money.”

“We were pioneering a small business for ourselves in the upper Midwest,” he said. “We didn’t plan on going to Las Vegas or California or New York.” 사설 토토사이트

“We really honestly didn’t know what we were getting into,” he added. “We were underprepared and underfunded to start something like this from scratch.”

However, the tour started slowly but surely. In the summer of 2005, three casinos in Minnesota and one in Wisconsin agreed to host the HPT Tournament. The tour’s production company, All In Productions, will air the episode in the fall.