Guts Poker’s Jostein Grødum: The Festival works both ways
Guts Poker’s Jostein Grødum is fresh off the phone with our own Franke von Zweigbergk - there are big things going on at Guts, although we can’t reveal exactly what until they go live in April. What we can discuss right now, though, is their upcoming partnership with The Festival in Tallinn this June.
Tallinn is an easy place to travel
“So we are jumping on board with The Festival! Tallinn is a place where we’ve done many live events for poker before - Cash Game Festival, and also tournaments for the Microgaming festival, etc. It’s a very good location for poker events - it comes between the markets we target, like Norway and Hungary - it’s an easy place to travel for those. So it’s a good hub in that sense, for people to come to play. And it also is a nice place to travel - it’s a really nice city, and you can do so much more there than just being at the casino playing poker. I mean, it’s not a big city in the sense of London or the bigger cities like that - it’s easy to get around and all that, so it’s great for players to do something besides play. So it ticks a lot of boxes when it comes to running a live event.”
With several months to go before The Festival kicks off, Guts have plenty of time to plan some extracurricular treats for their players - but they’ve wasted no time in setting up online qualifiers. Indeed, Guts are one of three online operators currently hosting our weekly Sunday qualifiers, where you can win a €1,600 package to The Festival in Tallinn that includes travel money, accommodation, and tickets for the poker Main Event as well as the blackjack or roulette events.
Numbers will be impressive for Tallinn
Jostein’s planning all sorts of The Festival-centric promotions for Guts players in the coming months. “We have our hands full now with the Norwegian championship in Dublin which we’re working on at the moment,” he says, “So we’ll start promotion for Tallinn after that has finished. So I can’t tell you our plans at the moment!” Jostein predicts that Guts will be sending a whopping 200-300 players to the Norwegians. “Well, they haven’t had it since 2019 there, and finally they can travel and play again, so there’s a real buzz about it. There’s always been massive interest in that event - and then we come to Tallinn after that.” He’s confident that numbers will be impressive for Tallinn as well. “I’m also hoping that The Festival will be the same,” he says, “Especially as it’s not an event that’s restricted to players from certain markets - it’s open to everyone, so it gives us the chance to push that kind of event to a new audience. Which is really nice.”
We can involve player who are not "Poker First"
While Jostein’s focus is on the poker side of things, he’s also excited about the casino events that run alongside poker at The Festival. “I always see that as a positive,” he tells me, “Because for us as operators it means we can involve players who are not ‘poker first’, who enjoy playing blackjack or roulette and stuff like that, but who want to try playing poker. And also our poker players might want to try casino games - so that works both ways.” Though Jostein nothing is confirmed yet, he’s in touch with his casino colleagues at Guts about possibly sending their own players to join in with the blackjack and roulette events. “To me it makes sense when you’re having a week-long event like that to add in those elements to reach a broader audience.”
If you fancy taking a shot at that €1,600 package and joining us in Tallinn for a full week of poker, parties, casino and the best that the city has to offer, €50 qualifiers are running on Guts every Sunday at 19:00 CET.
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