I see, then my only issue is the lack of players so far. I'll keep a close eye on it, however.
That may actually be a lot of people's issues with joining this tournament...they probably see no real payout if they happen to join in and no one else joins, so they're just sitting on the sideline waiting for a bunch of other people to join.
Problem is, no one else will join because they're all waiting for all these other people to join, who also aren't joining because they're waiting on the same thing that the other person is waiting on. So now you're just stuck with a whole bunch of people sitting there, waiting for someone to take their turn amongst a group of people who aren't going to take their turn unless someone else takes a turn, so no one really does anything, and then it eventually becomes a stall-out and all those people who did take the initiative end up leaving disappointed.
Hope that made sense. Probably not. Or it was just redundant, which is probably the most likely option.

Anyway, so yeah. I'm pretty sure that joining in the first place won't really have any drawbacks as it is. If there aren't enough people in by the deadline, then he'd either be forced to postpone again or give you your money back (or so I'd hope), so no matter what you'll end up getting your money's worth anyway.