The Power of Pool Tournaments

Tony Guy

Pool players love tournaments and they can in turn transform a quiet midweek evening. We spoke to Tony Guy, Head of Machines at Admiral Taverns about how important pool tournaments can be.  

“Pool is being played constantly across the UK, in various Leagues and tournaments with Admiral Taverns pubs up and down the country very much part of that,” he says.

At Admiral Taverns, we see pub games and teams as an important part of our community pubs’ offering. We support our customers, licensees and operators by hosting professional pool and dart challenge evenings throughout the year, these are generally on a quiet midweek evening to both boost trade for licensees and operators and offer interest and excitement for our customers. Most of our nominated suppliers support us with these events and they are well received indeed by all customers,” he adds.

One pub, the Albion at Tewkesbury, hosted an event recently on a Wednesday evening. “The event was well publicised in advance and the pub was packed to the rafters and on the night,” adds Tony. “There were 24 challengers; 12 men and 12 ladies, it was a brilliant night! Following a couple of the evenings, we have had requests for additional pool tables and machines to be sited as it has helped them either form a team or create additional teams with one pub reporting "sales were up 600% versus a usual Tuesday evening.”

“Naturally the pub needs to have a pool table, preferably a pool team, plenty of room around the table for spectators but most importantly have an operator or licensee that is keen and will promote the evening using posters and digital asset provided,” adds Tony. “To further support we run annual National Pool & Darts competitions across our licenced and tenanted estate and also our operator-,managed Proper Pubs estate.”

Michaela and Ross also run their own amateur tournament – with some significant prizes “When we launched the table, one of the ways to increase the brand awareness was to have a competition annually and to have it on Blackball tables,” she says.  “In the very first year, we only allowed people to enter or buy a spot effectively as a Blackball Table customer. So, we were cutting out the competition in that respect. Then venues had to have our tables to join in. And the other thing is, we're only allowing amateurs to enter. There are so many events out there for professionals and there's so much prize money available for professionals but the amateur scene is the bigger scene so it made sense to target the amateur scene. We had our second event earlier this year we offered a total of £67,000 prize money with the winner walking away with £10k. Pool is so successful that we struggled to secure our date for next year. Just this week I booked our next tournament in for February 2025, when we plan to sustain if not increase prize money and the number of people participating.”

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4 October 2023

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