City Tour? What would it take? Help Please!

[Tom_In_Cincy]

There are Weekly and Monthly tournaments in our fine city and its surrounding metro area.

I am thinking of starting a City Tour. Just in the Cincy area.
I need some suggestions about what to do.

These are some of the ideas I already have, but I'm not locked into any of them right now.. still in the 'idea' stage.

Please feel free to comment on any of the below items.
1. Talk to as many of the pool halls as possible to get their buy in to the idea.

2. Get ideas from each pool hall owner about what they expect to gain from this Tour.

3. Get ideas from the players about a ranking system, points for 1st-whatever.

4. Make it as easy as possible for the room owners to run and the players to figure out where they are in the standings.

5. Haven't figured out if 'added' is that important for each event .... but still haven't ruled it out.

6. Tour fees? how much is too much? Need to make it so that the final event has an 'added' for Champion.

7. Format? I am thinking of 2 tour events a month, with June, July and August only having 1 event (this would be a total of 21 events).

8. 20 events divided into 4 groups for 8 ball, 9 ball, One pocket and Banks. The last tournament event will be for the over all champion. And the event would be 10-ball.

9. Final event will only be open to the top 16 players (per point system.)

10. To be eligeble for the finals, all players must have played in at least 15 of the 20 events. Is this too high a number? I just want to make sure that the players will play in as many of the events as possible.. get to the different rooms and see different players.

11.

Tom, In my area, we've been running a tour somewhat like you describe. There are 3 rooms participating, and each session consists of 15 events. Events are every other weekend, at 2PM. The event is usually over by 8 PM, and the players stay around to match up afterwards, resulting in some added revenue for the rooms.

There is no added money for each event, however each room kicks in $250 to provide $750 added for an end of tour tournament (#16). To qualify for #16, players must enter at least 7 events, and play at least 1 at each location. We average about 30 players each time, and average 30 players qualifying for #16.

We use the NPL handicapping system, and it works beautifully for us. We just finished a session, and out of 15 regular session events, we had 14 different 1st place winners. Out of 112 money places paid, 64 different players cashed. One player cashed 5 times, (he played 12 events)and 5 players tied by cashing 4 times each. We had a total of 103 different players play in at least 1 event. If the matches were not handicapped, we'd not be averaging 30 players, and not be on our 4th year now.

The participating rooms are happy with the tour, and we all think we can see increased business as a result.

Good luck,
Andy G.