Your suggestions especially improving the private/public defense seemed fine, maybe they were already annoyed with low turnout and ready to move on. Maybe they have a friend who wants your job. Who knows.
Best of luck sir.
So fwiw, I was never consulted on the 200K Guaranteed Tournament, it was doomed to failure from the start. They spread out 10 day 1's at multiple clubs throughout the state, but for the clubs that were 3-4+ hours away from us, IF you made Day 2 you HAD to travel to Austin to play.
So maybe you fired a $360 initial buy-in and then some $180 re-entries. Well now you travel to Austin, pay fuel and tolls, get a hotel room for a couple of nights, pay for all the food expenses since you're far away from home. And your min-cash might be $550. So any profit you've made is already spent, and you have to go deep to actually realize any profit.
Tack this on with their Ft Worth location being HEAVYILY attended by freeroll players given the tournaments they regularly run, and I think it only got 1-2 of the flights to run out there, most of them didn't go. Their playerbase wasn't the type to buy into an event like this.
In addition, they scheduled it right when they Lodge was running a more affordable buy-in tournament with a guarantee 2x larger, AND they put our Day 3 on the Day 2 of the Lodges event, which forced players in Austin to choose ours or The Lodges.
Halfway through with 5 flights completed we were 152K short of our 200K guarantee. I saw this as an opportunity. Poker players love:
1. Value/free money
2. Integrity
If we're honoring the guarantee (which we should cause otherwise I'd quit, as would have others in the company) then we should promote the hell out of it. We'll siphon business from The Lodge we wouldn't have gotten otherwise because now we have a smaller and softer field with extra money available (they had also listened to advice finally to cancel Day 3 and just finish our event on Day 2 so people wouldn't have to pick and choose, they could play both)
Anyway, I had to argue the point of promoting the overlay like crazy for four days straight, before they finally relented and permitted me to do my thing. When all was said and done I promoted the absolute shit out of it and we went from a 152K overlay to under 28K, which after fees collected was covered with a small amount to spare.
The low turnout had zero to do with anything that involved me, that was decision makers above my head not thinking all the nuances through properly.
I had even encouraged them for the week of the 18th (when we had nothing going Mon-Thurs, and just a last-chance flight that Friday) to put up a diverse set of events like a Ladies event, Drawmaha, PLO/Big O, 2-7 Single Draw NL, etc. I saw that The Lodge ONLY had NLH tournaments running that week, but there'd be a shit-ton of people in town.
We could exploit the weakness in their schedule and the traffic they were bringing in, and drive additional business to our room by offering alternatives to people not interested in NLH tournaments.
Instead they decided to put together a bunch of uninspired NLH tournaments with $300 in lammers added to 1st place that I told them would flop (they did).
In addition, more than a month prior to our 200K Guaranteed Grand Opening Tournament I was inquiring if we had a trophy for the winner yet, "not yet" was always the response.
With maybe 4-5 days before our Day 2 where the winner would be crowned they text me "Anthony, got anyone who can get us a trophy?". I got that shit done, despite having it dropped on my lap at the last possible minute. One of the owners had the audacity to complain about the trophy being small.
So no, I don't see them having plans to replace me. The reason for the 50% pay bump was that I was told by the GM at the time of opening within a month I would receive "x" amount, that didn't happen and that GM wound up getting canned because he had no clue what he was doing.
In the first week of February I had my come to Jeezus moment with them and was told I'd receive the pay I was requesting, but it wouldn't kick in until March. So I was finally getting the expectation I had coming into this project.
This.
Better than getting fired.
Not sure where the disconnect was, but I WAS terminated. I had attempted to resolve legal concerns I had internally via communication with an owner and two upper level managers. In response they retaliated by changing my schedule to 6 graveyard front desk shifts. When I refused to come in for those shifts or promote them via social media (because I didn't want to engage in or promote illegal activity) is when they terminated me, stating in the email that I hadn't been coming in for my assigned shifts.
