Chris, that doesn't quite make sense.
You're asking Larry to pay several thousand extra in rent (a week with no means of generating income to cover rental costs) to schedule around your event. It would be his money, being spent for your sake. Yet, where does you spending money for his sake factor in? You're asking him to make a sacrifice for you, yet you're not offering him anything in return.
What does not make sense to you Nathan?
He stated clearly that pool halls and various promotors have been "working together" to schedual events that A) do not conflict and B) help the players attend the events because they bunch the events up close together both geographically and date-wise.
It benefits the players to have to make one trip to one area of the country to play in three different consecutive events over a relatively short period of time so that it minimizes air travel costs and lodging expense. Each tournament in turn benefits from the synergy of being part of a "leg" of a tour like this because the cumulative consectutive events all with decent added money are offering more incentive to the professionals to play in all of those events. Each event on its own might not be enough incentive for a pro to play on its own as the expense is too great to travel to a single event, but as a leg with 3 events all that size the economics make more sense.
It is in that way that pool promotors and tournaments directors are starting to work together.
Bonus Ball on the other hand is the new kid in town, and you are the ones that are not comming in and seeing how you can fit into a pool scene that is trying very hard to create an effective professional circuit.
Bonus Ball itself might benefit if it were to work with other pool promotions and attempt to add to the synergy that is already being created, but Bonus Ball has not attempted to contact those organizations and tournaments that are already in place and that pre-date Bonus Ball.
You ask why they have not tried to contact Bonus Ball to work something out, why instead did not Bonus Ball attempt to contact them and work something out, since those promotors and events in fact pre-date yours and have seniority and traditional dates for their events and have had such for years?
If Bonus Ball comes into this sport paying the players flat fees to play for funsies and conflicts with events already in place and lowers the number of pros that go to those other events those other events WILL suffer. Bonus Ball seems to have the mentality that this is OK and that they want to become "pro pool" in time and wipe out all of the other competition.
The problem is even YOU Nathan know enough to say "IF Bonus Ball has a second season", it is not a sure fire success and if it does indeed fail and in so doing causes a bunch of schedualing conflicts that take 10 professional players out of well established professional events that already exist and do well then Bonus Ball has the chance of causing MORE damage to the sport of professional pool then simply it's own demise. It may very well take out some already established events that suffer due to BB schedules not allowing the pros the ability to play in events they traditionally played in, lowering the fan interest in those events as a result, and causing an inevitable loss to pool of not only Bonus Ball but the other events that it refused to work with and schedule around.
You worked around the events you HAD to work around to get certain pros to commit to BB. Darren's statement is clear, he would play in your bonus ball league and take your moeny for doing so, but he wanted to be clear that he is going to play in the major international events that he tends to win on occasional such as world championships. You scheduled around some events for at least some players because you needed those players in your league to be legit and those players were not going to take a chance on your league and miss those events for you. Darren likely flat out told you "I need to play in the world 10-ball, the world 8-ball, ect..." and you said "ok, we will make sure not to schedule your match during the list of events you give us that you need/want to play in".
You did not schedule around certain events because you respect those events or the promotors, you scheduled around them because many of your professional pool players in your league told you they were not going to play in your league if it meant missing those events.
