blonde poker forum

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Please let this happen.

All we need to know about that guy is he got involved in TV poker 'coz I couldn't believe the players put up all the prize money, so I had to get involved'

He then created some of the worst TV poker ever and even charged the players the cost of the dealers in some events, yet made loads from the events himself.

The one thing he has got away with is making more money for himself than he is generating for the players yet has somehow managed to get an image of saving/improving the games for the players.

I  bet there will be a lot of old school darts players and fans hoping the snooker guys stick one right up him.

Ronnie O'Sullivan: Life Stories

Is about to start on itv4 should be a good watch.

What is the perceived problem with Hearn?

Hasn't he re-established a lot of interest in snooker? lots of new formats? lots more televised stuff? more sponsorship?

(I don't know, but that's the PR the random with a slight interest such as me is fed)

i get the impression he is very unpopular within snooker?

Bugger all chance of a breakaway rival code being successful IMO. Ronnie is an enigma and will do things his own way. At some point, Hearn will need to soften his stance to save face and Ronnie will be allowed to nip in and out as he sees fit.

He's cleaning up the sport, the standard of snooker is infinitely better than it was even five years ago and players are making more money.

That a handful of them don't like being told they should play 20 days a month like the rest of us is something for which I have little sympathy.

Perfectly written.

Hats off for your involvement in the best televised poker tournament ever staged in the UK Phil.

But he is running these events for his benefit more than the players tho Rich, The players are getting more prize money to play for but he has taken the tour to so many far out venues that most are worse off because of the added expense yet he is selling a huge amount of extra tickets at the events, esp in Asia. He also benefits from the peripheral cash floating around some tournaments. The money from TV is mostly his too, the big benefit is all his.

At the Ally Pally for the World darts you did have to buy your beer tokens before you entered the venue, so you had to take a guess on how many pints you wanted and pay up front. If you wanted more you could buy more, if you wanted refunds it is tough shit. He has even found a way of selling more pints than are consumed. Guess who is in on the food and beverage money?

It is the same at other venues he is sending events to.

So the players exes have gone thru the roof yet he is filling out venues in Asia and other places, in the Brazilian event last year the players turned up to find there were no tables to play on, they didn't get a practice table until about 2 days before it started. That was an event he had arranged at a good place for ticket sales that nobody had managed to get snooker tables to. Imagine how you feel when you turn up to play there knowing that the guy that's raking it in cannot even be bothered to make sure there are tables there?

The new formats you mentioned I guess the one frame shootout event that has spawned another wave of iffy matches made him a good few quid. The championship snooker league he simply set up because he was asked by bookmakers to provide more events to increase turnover. They paid him decent money to arrange it, they are played in tiny venues with almost no fans and the players get a pittance per frame. Guess how many new bent matches that has given life to?

His security team for both sports is basically made up of his mates and is just a shambles, the only time any action has been taken is when it was unavoidable( Higgins) and finally after all these years Lee decided to go for another coup in the first TV event he played after getting off with blatant cheating almost 2 years earlier, the investigation seems to consist of making it last so long everyone has forgotten about it. Even other players were giving him grief on Twitter about having backed his opponents in games. Hearn had all the players warned when he took over that the slate was wiped clean there and then but any bent games from then were treated seriously.

How many bent games have seen players brought to task, the biggest ban has been Joe Jogia, who is so middle of the road it doesn't matter to Hearn who got 2 years for not playing in a game that he and his mates had tried to fix, he pulled out when he found out the cat was out of the bag. Higgins got caught red handed and got 6 months, serious money maker and kept his mouth shut and needed to make money for Hearn going forward.

The Premier lge was ridic for a few years when Jimmy White kept getting in, In 2011 they even decided that the world senior champion of 2010 would get in, after Jimmy had actually won it!

Kerchiiing ticket/beer/pie/burger/merchandise sales, tough shit on the guy that should have been in instead.

tyvm Keith

Its like George Michael performing a glut of classic songs he has written and letting Andrew Ridgeley make more money than him because he found them somewhere to sing, and then letting Ridgeley sell the TV rights and keep the cash and make chunks from all the programmes and refreshments.

 ;carlocitrone;

If you sell your sport to Hearn, you know what's going to happen. There's going to be a lot more money in the sport, you as a player are probably going to be a bit better off, but Hearn is going to keep most of the money.

The difference in snooker is that there is no Phil the Power.

Have had no dealings with the man - and I respect the opinions of those who are better acquainted - but this, basically.

I had an immense amount of pleaseure calling Hearn a 'see you next Tuesday' to his face at Roots Hall once!!

I really enjoyed that Rich. The fella is definitely an enigma, & struggles with his "demons", but it was refreshing to see & hear him talk so honestly & openly.

For all that, though, the best memory was that interview they showed, (was it with Danny Baker?) with the 10 or 11 year old Boy Wonder, sweeping all before him, maybe Local League Champion awaited, County Champion, even higher things in the world of snooker were aspired to.

So the interviewer innocently asks "How big can you be?"

He got an equally innocent reply.

5'-10" 

Complaining the Asian Players Tour Championship contains Asian Players seems a bit silly to me.

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If you controlled a sport, and that sport might be popular in China, you'd go for it, wouldn't you?

I don't see why this is a problem

China is a huge growth market for any sport, and likely to be attractive to many sponsors

It is a huge advantage a sport like snooker has that it has this opportunity, when many others don't

I know for the UK fan its not as marketable as the Rocket v Judd Trump on UK TV, but its a bit insular to decry it isn't it?

yeah all smacks of hypocrisy. Who thinks the World Series of baseball is a world wide event.

I have had met Barry Hearn a couple of times but not enough to offer an opinion of the man. However I do like Eddie and Bajul Patel at Matchroom and have always come across as decent enough chaps.

Its a good point to a point tho, some sports have insular tours that occasionally meet. Golf has a Euro US Asian tours and in the majors or start and end of the year the tours kind of merge to provide some cross over. Asia is now seen as the next big growth area in golf but there is still a divide between the tours. Now in snooker the Asia market is being targeted by Hearn but with the main European player having to provide the marketable matches at the expense of playing in European venues. So they are basically being used to stimulate snooker in Asia for the benefit of someone else down the line.

If Hearn ran a Euro tour and an Asian swing then fair enough but he knows he has nothing to market in Asia without using the big Euro names.

Stephen Hendry seems to have reached a moment of clarity when he realised he could play in Asia every night of the week and command a big fee for exhibitions given his standing in the game, or he could rock up at every Hearn event and play for the same as everyone else, at his expense and someone else got the cash.

It left him with a no brainer to 'retire' and go and play all the exhibitions he could handle out there, so the tour is starting to suffer because of one guys idea of how to make himself more money at the expense of the players.

Call me a capitalist but if a guy drags a brand from the gutter, massively widens its audience and appeal, increases tenfold the number of opportunities those involved have to make a living and improves the quality of the product in doing so, I don't mind that he takes a good chunk of the net profits.

Just an outsider/consumer, but that's how I see it.

I was under the impression he is having tough time with his kids, custody battle etc with his ex wife/girlfriend and is allowed them every other weekend or something similar, and refuses to miss these weekends.

So not 100% to do with Hearn, could be wrong though.

but he hasn't dragged it from the gutter, what happened to snooker is that its core audience was so old that it died off. I once chatted to one of the TV people at The Crucible and she said something that I still remember now( it was pre Internet when Ceefax was the best way of getting scores)

''The reason that snooker coverage is on so late at night is it is a victim of it's own popularity because even when we show it at 23.30 we still get loads of viewers tuning in at that time of night. If we showed it at 22.00 we would get the same viewers but as a channel would have a smaller % of the viewers viewing TV at that time.''

What then happened is the middle aged group got older and the older fan base died off, and younger/ potential new fans are not sitting by the fire at 23.30 on a Friday night( like we did all those years ago to watch semi finals of the Worlds) waiting to see Graeame Dott fight out a 9 framer against Mark Selby. So it's viewer base did suffer massively but it is still a well loved sport. The loss of the tobacco sponsors was what did the most harm because you suddenly lost a big section of sponsors in one go and at a time when times were getting harder all round and new sponsors even harder to find.These days they still know late night viewers will watch it which is why they have those extended highlights packages on until 2/3 am during the World Championships.

What Hearn did was understand he needed to get a new audience for it to maximise the profit he could make from it. If he had set it up so that all the players were to benefit then fair enough and more of them would be on side but it isn't working that way. He is almost doing an MK Dons/ Baltimore Ravens in franchising snooker into Asia for huge personal gain and neglecting the Euro tour because it would make him less money but he wants the players to do it for him. The increase to the players from playing in Asia is not significant enough outside the ones that win to make it fair to them at the moment.

This is what then leads to more bent games because you can fly half way round the world, get beat 5-4 in the first round and fly half way round the world to get home at your expense or you can go to Telford or wherever, play a best of 5 championship game in front of nobody when you get £100 each frame you win. Or you can go to the game and arrange a result with the other guy and scoop yourself a few K in bets and be home in time for tea and scones.

It is affecting the game in all areas.

Ronnie's reason for not playing and Hearn's reason for being involved are points of speculation, so I respect your points but I'll shy away from that.

The sport was dying. People would still play and people would still watch the major comps on TV but, as I understand it:

1. There were only a handful of tournaments all year
2. Fewer players were staying pro
3. The standard of play was declining (see above), so games were more cautious and there were more misses
4. Audiences were therefore less interested in watching earlier rounds or more than a select group of players.

Hearn has put a line through all four of these, as far as I can see.

IIRC, a billion people watched the world championship final. If appealing to China is a bad thing, the world has gone bonkers.

One of the changes is that it has become more like golf, where the players ranked 17-100 can jet round the world, miss the cut and be on the plane again with nothing to show for it. That might be true but it is a career choice. If some don't want to do that, yes there will be money in exhibitions and such the like.

Darts was on its proverbial before Hearn got involved and now it is an exciting, appealing and improving sport. Snooker was threatening to go the same way and he's found a way to make it appealing again.

That 3m Brits watch it is ancillary when there are 6billion people in the world. If it means that 8 of the top 16 are Chinese in 10 years' time, as long as the standard is better, I don't mind.

"One of the changes is that it has become more like golf, where the players ranked 17-100 can jet round the world, miss the cut and be on the plane again with nothing to show for it."


not sure of this analogy

the mid ranked players in golf make an absolute shed load of money ever year not sure snooker players do yet

If Dubai gets into snooker they might :)

Edit: the region; not the blonde

They dragged fishing into a new era with fishomania. Just popped onto their website and discovered that Ping Pong is not table tennis :)

http://www.matchroomsport.com/sports/ping_pong/history.htm

It's been a great series so far, would definitely recommend watching the other 2 episodes before Ronnie's.

Urgh - hate entering into this sort of argument but don't really like your attitude here. For way too long snooker has been predominantly a niche UK sport with the odd cameo from overseas. I think it's great to see it expanding, although would like to see it go beyond just Asia. However if that brings more cash into the game then it could snowball and attract a wider range of players to the game.

You need to get over the fact you can't pronounce the names! :)

I understand you points Tal but they aren't the same points I am making. If Hearn (rightly) sees Asia as a massive growth snooker market then he should have set up an Asian tour. What he did instead was talk the current bigger names in snooker into believing that the events he was setting up out there were for their benefit in the form of bigger prizes on offer.

What has actually happened is he has just stopped trying to implement more proper tourneys in the Euro zone. The TPC make do events just aren't enough. What the players have realised now is they are being used to stimulate a tour in Asia that is sucking out the amount of events in Europe and taking money away that would in the past have been directed to stimulate Euro events in some cases.

They are paying out of their own pockets to go to Asia and help Hearn's new tour grow. I go back to the Hendry point. When he was flying to Asia to play events almost all the tickets sold for his game where because he was playing. He had all the expense and did his own work to promote those matches yet someone else kept the ticket money, the merchandise money and the TV money from all his games, what is the benefit to Stephen from that set up and what is the benefit to Hearn?

So Stephen decided **** this for a game, I will retire from his new tour and go and play the exact same games as exhibitions. I keep the ticket money, I get appearance money, I get the merchandise cash and peripheral spend cut.

As I said above if he had set up an Asian tour and then had some co sanctioned events, some in Asia and some in Europe he would have spread the benefit and generated events in both zones but because there is more money in Asia he has just directed all the players to that region instead, simply because he can make much more money out there.

Your point about darts is a pretty sore one, there were a lot more darts players that suffered against the ones in his circle that benefited. The main point being that of those that did benefit, Hearn made much much more.( and just like Snooker, if you are in the circle and generate money you stay in as long as possible which is why the likes of Manley and Mardle were still in events when they could barely throw the dart str8)

Interesting points, Bobby1. I respect that you have a position of greater knowledge on these matters. It isn't uncommon for "The talent" to make less than the guy pulling the strings. I wonder whether the music industry might serve as a reasonable comparator.

As a consumer, I like the product, I like that of is more readily available and I like that I can see improvement in the quality of the product over time.

Darts is an interesting point and there has definitely been occasions where even my outsider eyes have seen surprising Premier League inclusions.

Would it be fair to say that if you are very good, you will get the exposure, even if you're not a marketable character? If you're knocking in centuries for fun, or you're averaging 100+ with three darts, Hearn will support you? That is the impression I have always got. I appreciate he will also support top 16/32 players who are "crowd-pleasers", but it is about making money.

Bobby1, slightly off topic buthow mamy fixed games of Darts do think their has been since Hearn cane along to the PDC? compared to the bent games in Snooker over the same time frame?