"Sportifying" Poker: Global poker league

[TightEnd]

thoughts welcome. there have been various incarnations of team and league events in poker...here is nthe latest try from GPI

http://www.globalpokerindex.com/corporate/blog-global-poker-league-next-piece-puzzle-sportify-poker/

"These initiatives are powerful, but not enough to achieve the end goal: to Sportify Poker in full. The missing piece? ‘Sports formatted’ poker events controlled and run by GPI. Fully sportified events that exist in a larger framework – a league – with no gambling and the power to attract mainstream sports and news media.

    World Cup

Our Global Poker Masters (GPM) is a first step. Labelled “Poker’s World Cup” and slated to be held in early 2015, GPM brings the top eight Poker Countries in the world together to compete. With five elite national players per team GPM will be livestreamed internationally across dozens of prominent sports sites. We have clear precedents – Tennis has the Davis Cup, Football has the World Cup, and Poker has the Global Poker Masters. On a personal level I can’t wait to see what happens when ‘Team France’ runs into ‘Team USA’.

    Professional League

Our next step in 2015 is to launch the last piece of the GPI puzzle – the Global Poker League (GPL). It’s our most ambitious (read: risky) project to date and one capable of creating uniquely sportified poker content build for mainstream digital sports and news media.

GPL will be Poker’s professional league. The initial vision is to have a series of live events akin to a sports season co-hosted by international poker events, with between six to eight different franchises (poker teams) competing against one another with initial seasons lasting a short three to four months. Unlike the Global Poker Masters – where teams are comprised of each Nation’s top 5 available players – GPL teams will consist of “draftable” players from GPI’s Rankings and wildcard entries. I’ve already presented this concept, and terms for participation, to a number of prospective future team owners. It’s been an extremely positive experience – reception has been warm across the board and we’ve already had a number of commitments from intrigued future ‘franchise’ owners. Commitments from leading figures from both in front of and behind the felt are rolling in too.
Vision

Tie all of these things together, and you have GPI’s grand vision – rankings, connected to digital sports distribution, Poker’s World Cup in the form of GPM, a professional league with GPL, fan engagement via Fantasy Poker Manager, with Awards and Industry conferences as added threads.

In short – a new authority, sports vertical, and a fully realized marketing vehicle for the world’s live poker ecosystem. One that doesn’t compete with any existing poker stakeholders but rather empowers them to grow alongside.We want to create a new overarching layer to this industry capable of serving the poker space as a whole."


Plenty of marketing industry buzzwords to go at!

[DungBeetle]

Bottom line is that poker is fun to play, but extremely boring to watch unless it is edited highlights.  Watching 10 hours of a poker tournament would be like watching paint dry to the casual viewer.

[DungBeetle]

Plus they'll end up picking players like TJ Cloutier and Annie Duke, so who cares?

[kinboshi]

Next stop, the Olympics

[The Camel]

What a load of old bollocks.

[VBlue]

What a load of old bollocks.

Keith's got the commentary on this announcement covered.

[MelissaChloe]

I might be the only one, but I actually like the idea 

[booder]

Who is financing this?

[kinboshi]

Who is financing this?

Keith?

[bergeroo]

I find the whole concept of GPIs involvement in poker odd the whole way. I've never really understood their agenda and what they are trying to do and more importantly, why? Poker and sports are different. Unless you get sponsors in who are going to provide the whole prize pool then it is always going to be shoehorning poker into a sports format.

Personally I'd rather see it the other way. How putting sports into a poker format. For example, top tennis players playing for 100k per game vs each otherr? The money has to be kept at the side of the court in cash and is handed over after each set. How would Murray do if he is stuck and steaming and down three sets to love?

[theprawnidentity]

I have been telling people I'm an athlete for ages.  Finally going to get it through!!!

[claypole]

I am a little bit confused by the business model as well.  It's close to my heart as in a previous role I had numerous discussions with regard to the business that did that London Eye thing, International Poker Federation and whether their was a model where content could be monetised.  That has to be the aim, and it has to be the aim of GPI - either to monetise content (editorial, data, events) or move sideways into a play at live events or an online poker room.  The later seems unlikely.

I struggle to see how content can be monetised, as did the (big) commercial brains at the time, in simple terms driven by some of the comments made earlier - the game has little mass appeal and if it did stars, WPT etc would already of exploited.   I guess the only other angle would be if the portal, fantasy league, and associated content could drive enough traffic to monetise through online advertising, whilst I have no info on the traffic that Hendon Mob and GPI sites drive my instinct is there would have to significant increase to make advertising a viable commercial option.  The other angle is obviously the whole fantasy sports thing has taken of in the US and maybe they think that's an angle; again not to sure how it competes with NFL, Baseball etc.

Be interesting to see how it pans out....

[bergeroo]

Well they bought the hendon mob database, so presumably thing that is important, though it isn't really a case of having proprietary content, more a case of nobody else can be bothered to accurately document live poker results. But a lot of people use that site and therefore they get hits. So what will they do with that? To achieve something there has to be meaning and therefore someone has to be number one. The thing that tennis has to its advantage over poker, to continue with the analogy, is that in tennis the same guys get to the semi finals most weeks, whereas in poker tournaments every final table is different and even a world class player might be expected only to win one or two tournaments a year at best. So there is no story and no great rivalries. The only thing with any history in poker is WSOP, you can't really manufacture that out of thin air, you need many years.

In the GPI rankings there really can only be someone who plays super high rollers who can be number one. So that's really only 30 or so people, so there is something artificial that keeps the rankings repetitively static. Not to take anything away from people like Ole Schemion of Vanessa S who are obviously sick good at poker, but mentioning no names, even some former business guy who plays all the high rollers and has a huge negative ROI can be neat the top 'in the world'. So what do these rankings mean? Well very little.

I also don't see how at all how it can be monitised either. You can achieve influence and maybe that can be leveraged somehow? There are even other similar sites, one called Ranking Hero.

I have no interest whatsoever in how Team France does against Team USA. Why should I?

Don't get it/

[AndrewT]

This thing all falls down because who are the top 5 players in each country? In other sports the top performers are more consistent - if there's a competition to find the best tennis player in Serbia, I'd be pretty confident that Djokovic is going to win nearly every single time.

But poker - it doesn't work like that. Either the top 5 players are going to change all the time because variance, or, in order to get the same players every time (to build brand, player recognition etc), the system will be gamed to favour the usual characters playing big money tournaments (usually not with their own money).

This does all sound very ambitious - have they hired Wembley Stadium yet?

[baldock92]

What a load of old bollocks.

This