The Grosvenor Goliath began in 2011 and has taken place in Coventry every year, apart from in 2020 and 2021, when it moved online during Coronavirus lockdown and social distancing times. The concept is simple: a low buy-in poker tournament, with a huge field, that generates a massive prize pool and a six figure first prize. It costs £200 to play (£160+£40) and has multiple starting flights for players to take a shot at the big money that awaits those who make it to the final table.
The size of the first prize will depend on whether there’s any business done on the final table, which there has been for the last two years, but the pre-deal amount should be in the region of £200,000 or more. There’s never been a double winner, but nevertheless, the defending champion is Will Watkins and best of luck to him in this year’s event. He scooped the 2024 Goliath for £166k after a heads-up deal with Gilbert Black, who took a bit more (£175k) in the chop.
The event is the single most important live event on the UK’s annual poker calendar. If you only play live poker once a year, this is the event to do it at. The festival begins on July 24th and continues until August 3rd, with the first of eight starting days for the Goliath getting underway on Saturday July 26th.
What’s on the Schedule
In addition to the Goliath itself, there’s a lot more poker on the tournament schedule. A regular Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT) stop is included in the 11-day schedule. The GUKPT is now in its 19th season, with Main Events priced at £1,100+£150 and the Coventry edition runs from 24th-27th July. It has a £1m guarantee, which is ambitious, as there were 632 entrants in this event in 2024 and it will require over 900, a tour record by some distance, to meet this guarantee.
The Goliath starts during the first weekend, with the first flight on Saturday 26th at 12pm, running side by side with Day 2 of the GUKPT Main. As well as these two key events, there are lots of other tournaments to get stuck into. For the big spenders there’s a £1,500 High Roller and a £3,000 Super High Roller, both taking place early on in the festival.
There are several multi-starting day side events on the schedule, such as the £440 Card Room Direct Mystery Bounty, the £300 Main Event Travel Open and the £500 PokerNews Cup. The Main Event Travel Open has a £100,000 guarantee.
There are two 4-card Omaha tournaments, with £250 and £550 buy-ins, plus a Ladies and a Seniors event. The rest of the festival is filled with lower buy-in tournaments, including several hosted by Redtooth Poker, the UK’s biggest pub poker league.
Tournament Schedule
| Date | Event | Starting Flights | Entry Fee | Start Time | Late Reg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 – 28 July | Event 1 – GUKPT Main Event | 4 | £1100+£150 | 12.00 | Start of Day 2 |
| 26 July – 3 August | Event 2 – The Goliath | 8 | £160+£40 | 12:00/13:00/19:00 | End of Level 12 |
| 27 July | Event 3 – Ladies Event | 1 | £175+£25 | 12:00 | End of Level 9 |
| 27 -28 July | Event 4 – High Roller | 1 | £1,350+£150 | 16:00 | Start of Day 2 |
| 27 – 31 July | Event 5 – Cardroom Direct Mystery Bounty | 3 | £200+£200+£40 | 19:00 | End of Level 12 |
| 29 – 30 July | Event 6 – Super High Roller | 1 | £2800+£200 | 12:00 | End of Level 9 |
| 29 July | Event 7 – PLO 4 Card | 1 | £220+£30 | 18:00 | End of Level 6 |
| 30 July | Event 8 – Joker’s Wild Does Carer’s Trust | 1 | £75+£10+£15 | 18:30 | End of Level 6 |
| 31 July | Event 9 – PLO 4 Card High Roller | 1 | £500+£50 | 16:00 | End of Level 6 |
| 31 July – 3 August | Event 10 – Main Event Travel Open | 4 | £260+£40 | 17:00 | End of Level 10 |
| 2 – 3 July | Event 11 – PokerNews Cup | 1 | £500+£50 | 14:00 | Start of Day 2 |
| 2 July | Event 12 – The Giant | 1 | £200+£25 | 18:00 | End of Level 6 |
| 3 July | Event 13 – Seniors | 1 | £130+20 | 11:00 | End of Level 5 |
| 3 July | Event 14 – Turbo | 1 | £150+20 | 17:00 | End of Level 8 |
Goliath Main Event Schedule
- Buy-In: £160+£40
- Starting Chips: 25,000
- Levels Played on Day 1: 18 (except on Flight H Turbo, which plays down to 10% of the field)
- Clock: 14 x 30-mins levels then 40-mins (except Flight H Turbo, which is run on a 15-mins clock all the way through.
- Late Registration: 12 levels
- Re-entries: Unlimited
| Date | Event Name | Start Time |
|---|---|---|
| Sat 26 Jul | Goliath Flight A | 12:00 |
| Sun 27 Jul | Goliath Flight B | 12:00 |
| Mon 28 Jul | Goliath Flight C | 12:00 |
| Tue 29 Jul | Goliath Flight D | 12:00 |
| Wed 30 Jul | Goliath Flight E | 12:00 |
| Thu 31 Jul | Goliath Flight F | 11:00 |
| Fri 1 Aug | Goliath Flight G | 11:00 |
| Fri 1 Aug | Goliath Flight H Turbo | 18:00 |
| Sat 2 Aug | Goliath Day 2 | 11:00 |
| Sun 3 Aug | Goliath Day 3 | 11:00 |
Last Chance to Qualify
Online satellites to the Goliath have been running on PokerStars since April, but there are still a few opportunities left to bag your seat. Costing just £22 to enter, seat only satellites take place at 8pm (UK time) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays and will continue right up until the event gets underway.
The weekday satellites guarantee 12 seats and have been awarding 20 or more, while the Sunday satellite is a mega, with 50 seats guaranteed. Last Sunday’s satellite produced 80 seat winners and the last one, scheduled for Sunday July 27th, could be even bigger.
Grosvenor Poker also runs Live Credit satellites, which are valid for almost all poker events that take place within the Grosvenor Casino estate, including the Goliath. They run 3 times per day with varying buy-ins, awarding a total of £20,000 per week in live credit. These give players flexibility to use credit to play side events or main events and Grosvenor’s USP on these is that the credit will never expire.
How to Follow Coverage of the Goliath
Live coverage of the event is shown on Grosvenor Poker’s YouTube and Facebook pages. There’s a feature table every day with commentary by Phil ‘The Tower’ Heald, Jay Harwood and guests.
The Tower has recently returned from the WSOP, where he made Day 3 of the Main Event, but he won’t be playing this time, reserving himself for commentator duties. Grosvenor Poker ambassadors Katie Swift, Jamie Nixon and Ludovic Geilich are all likely to do stints in the booth, having shined on previous occasions on the mic.
poker.pro will be at the Goliath this year, not with full live reporting, but with regular articles throughout the Main Event, following the progress towards the final table. Pokernews is sponsoring one of the side events, so there is likely to be coverage of one kind or another on there also.
For full disclosure, I’ve been playing the satellites myself and have won a few bullets into the Main Event. I hope to bag a stack at the first time of asking and use the rest for side events.
Goliath Origins
Why was the Goliath created? Back in 2010, the GUKPT was in its 4th season and was already established as the focal point of the UK’s live poker community. It was doing very well, but there was something missing, a low buy-in big prize pool event that would be within the buy-in range of almost every player, not just those who play at the higher levels that the GUKPT catered for.
Grosvenor used to run an event called the Grosvenor Grand Prix, which catered for this low buy-in market and had a six figure prize pool. It cost £100 to enter qualifying heats that took place at every club in the Grosvenor estate, with those who made it through convening in Walsall to contest the business end of the event, where everyone was in the money. It did very well every year, then one year, in 2008, it drastically failed.
Players stopped showing up to the qualifying heats and with no provision to buy-in on the day, it had a huge overlay, maybe the biggest ever in percentage terms. The main reason it failed was because it had a Pot Limit format and although poker was booming, that variant had all but been abandoned, the new players only knew No Limit. The event was cancelled.
Fast forward a couple of years and the need for a low buy-in, big prize money tournament resurfaced. At the time, I was about to leave Grosvenor to start working with PokerStars and was no longer working there when the first Goliath took place. But I remember the drive back to London with Russell Tamplin (then Head of Poker for Rank Group) after the final national poker meeting I attended, during which we discussed the need for such an event. We brainstormed the idea during the journey and even proposed calling it “The Goliath.” The event got the go-ahead soon after I left Grosvenor.
The first Goliath took place in 2011 with a £120 buy-in, but it rose to £150 in 2022 and in 2024 it was bumped up to £200, where it remains for 2025. Discounting the years it moved online, participation has grown every year and last year the bar was set at 11,749, edging up from 11,493 in 2023, when the buy-in was £150. Will it break its own record once again? Could the prize pool reach £2m for the first time? History suggests it will.
Redtooth at the Goliath
Pub poker league Redtooth is staging ten events at the Goliath in 2025, hosted by Glenn Brown. They take place from 24th-28th and also on the final weekend, 2nd & 3rd of August. All are priced between £75 and £125, with the main focus being the Redtooth Big One, with a £125 buy-in and a £25,000 guarantee. It begins on Sunday 27th July and concludes on Sunday 28th, taking place in the Sportsbar area, to give it a pub poker feel.
The Malta 52 event is actually a satellite, where packages to the Malta 52 event at the Battle of Malta will be played for.
| Date | Event Name | Entry Fee | Start Time | Late Reg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fri 25 July | Redtooth Opener | £100+£20 | 11:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Fri 25 July | RedTooth Hyper Turbo | £80+£20 | 19:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sat 26 July | RedTooth Bounty | £50+£50+£20 | 11:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sat 26 July | RedTooth Malta 52 Tag Team | £160+£40 | 19:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sun 27 July | RedTooth Open | £80+£20 | 11:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sun 27 – Mon 28 July | RedTooth Big One | £100+£25 | 19:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sat 2 August | RedTooth Malta 52 Open | £100+£25 | 15:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sun 3 August | RedTooth RPT Invite Only | N/A | 12:00 | N/A |
| Sun 3 August | Redtooth Hyper Turbo | £80+£20 | 15:00 | End of Level 6 |
| Sun 3 August | RedTooth All In or fold Double Chance | £60+£15 | 15:00 | End of Level 6 |
What is Redtooth?
Redtooth is the UK’s largest pub poker league, with hundreds of poker nights taking place every week in pubs all across the UK. Pub poker is legal in the UK, as long as stakes as kept low, with the maximum permitted buy-in being £5 and prize pools capped at £100. Cash games aren’t allowed, only tournaments, but they can be part of a wider league and that is exactly how Redtooth operates.
The country is divided into regions and each region holds a quarterly final, with the winners of each final receiving an entry into an annual event that takes place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. To get an entry into a regional final, you simply have to win one of the pub poker nights.
In London there are over 70 pubs running pub poker nights every week. Some pubs run them as freerolls with £100 prize pools, others charge a small buy-in. They’re typically held on nights when the pub would be quieter than usual, e.g. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, resulting in them not being so quiet after all.
If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen poker taking place in a pub, when there’s so many pubs running them, it’s because they don’t take place out in the open; legally, they must be held in a private room. The Redtooth website has a handy venue finder to help find the nearest pubs with poker nights, with all the details in one place.
Photos courtesy of Grosvenor Casinos, Redtooth and WSOP
