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New stars aren’t being minted like they were during the poker boom, and mainstream audiences are still more likely to recognize a player like Mike Matusow than Jason Mercier, despite what the results say.
Poker fans aren’t engaging with poker stars like they did in the early 2000s, and it’s limiting the industry’s ability to establish itself in the mainstream.
The endorsement opportunities for players and sponsorship options available to major poker events are narrow, largely confined to online poker sites, casinos and a handful of other Internet players.
And while other outsider sports like snowboarding have done big things to break into the mainstream, poker is held back by a unique set of challenges.
These are the issues standing in the way of poker’s continuing growth, and it’s what the Epic Poker League hopes to overcome.
A Pro League and Fan Engagement are Key“When you have someone win a tournament like the Main Event and they’re supposed to be the world champion, but no one’s ever seen them before and you might never see them again, that feels like a step backwards,” says Annie Duke, Commissioner of the Epic Poker League.
Annie Duke“I think skill should be rewarded and today’s really great players should be given the same kind of platform that players from my generation had,” Duke told PokerListings.com.
Annie Duke was among the first crop of real poker celebrities, players who managed to break out of the poker world and gain at least some mainstream recognition.
The sister of poker figurehead Howard Lederer, and one of the few legitimate female pros on the scene, Duke was in the right place at the right time when poker got big.
But despite making many TV appearances playing poker, the average American is more likely to recognize Duke from much more mainstream television.
Duke finished second on Celebrity Apprentice and has appeared on shows like Ellen and The Colbert Report.
She’s written an autobiography and she’s appeared side-by-side with Don Cheadle for many Ante Up for Africa charity events.
She’s also won more than $4.27 million playing poker tournaments.
In short she understands that the opportunities available to poker players extend beyond the felt, or at least that they should.
“I was really lucky to have been around right at the beginning when there were only 100 people or so playing every event,” said Duke.
“It was a limited group of people that the fans were engaging with and it allowed them to get to know the players really well.
Vanessa Selbst“They were seeing the same people over and over again and when I was thinking during the early days of Epic, about who poker’s biggest stars are now as far as the average American is considered, and it’s still these same pros that were around in the beginning,” she said.
Despite prodigies like Jason Mercier and Vanessa Selbst crushing the live tournament circuit they’re not getting much mainstream traction.
And that should be surprising, because their stories are eminently compelling.
Vanessa Selbst isn’t an introverted online grinder or a lucky degenerate. She’s a 27-year-old Yale Law student who heads her school’s Queer-State Alliance and fights for civil rights.
And when she wasn’t doing that she was busy winning $4.74 million traveling the world playing tournament poker.
Jason Mercier is a young, clean-cut Floridian who has succeeded in poker beyond what most thought possible, earning over $7.6 million since 2008.
Both of these players have endorsement deals with PokerStars but neither of them have done much to break into the mainstream.
Professionalism and a Standard of Conduct in PokerIn addition to providing a framework that fosters fan engagement, Epic Poker has introduced the poker world’s first formal code of conduct.
And that’s an element Epic believes is critical in attracting the kind of mainstream corporate sponsorship that could really open things up for players.
Stephen Martin is the head of the Epic Poker Ethics Committee and one of the central developers of their Code of Conduct.
Martin is a former federal prosecutor who took what he’s learned about ethics in professional sports and corporate America, and applied it to poker.
Stephen Martin, head of the Epic Ethics Committee.“What we’re trying to do is professionalize the sport of poker and do it in a way that’s going to have significant benefits for professional poker players,” Martin told PokerListings.com.
“Meaning more opportunities for them, more prizes, more corporate sponsorships, more of the mainstream stuff you see associated with more traditional sports,” he said.
In Martin’s opinion the closed system of the Epic Poker League offers the continuity and safety that major corporate brands find appealing.
But he also believes a lot of the work will fall to the players themselves.
“This isn’t really about discipline,” he said. “We want poker players to conduct themselves professionally and personally in a way that maximizes the ability of the community as a whole to do well.
“So with that comes with some responsibilities. The people who really need to embrace this and lead this isn’t Epic Poker, it’s the players.
Martin looks to other sports, and the progress they’ve been able to make, when plotting out poker’s future.
“There’s a bit of a maverick streak in poker, sure, but that’s true of professional snowboarding or the X-Games,” he said.
“At one point they really were an outside organization and very maverick, and we can look at what they’ve been able to do professionalizing those sports, and the benefits it has had for everyone involved,” Martin added.
Following Snowboarding’s LeadDespite obvious differences, poker and snowboarding have followed similar trajectories as outsider sports embraced by mainstream culture.
Annie Duke sees public perception as a major obstacle to poker's growth.But while the public pulled snowboarding close, many have kept poker at arm’s length.
“I think the biggest obstacle really is just the perception of poker,” explained Annie Duke.
“When Joan Rivers went on her diatribe (on Celebrity Apprentice) about who poker players really are, she’s not alone in that opinion unfortunately.
“There’s still a large part of the population that are sort of scared of poker and think that it’s shady or some sort of backroom activity,” said Duke.
Snowboarding doesn’t have the same kind of image problems, and beyond the inherent danger of flying down a steep sheet of ice strapped to a piece of fiberglass, it’s pretty easy for people to get behind.
But the explosion in snowboarding’s popularity didn’t happen on its own.
“The biggest step was when snowboarding started getting on mainstream TV,” Snowboard Canada's Editor in Chief Scott Birke told PokerListings.com.
“Corporations saw that they could make a lot of money by aligning themselves with snowboarding even though it was a bit of an outsider sport,” he said, explaining why you can turn on the television today and see a nationwide snowboard tour sponsored by Mountain Dew.
Snowboarding had everything that poker still needs, the key points being good public image and the opportunity for fans to engage with the sport’s elite players.
Snowboarding is what poker wants to be, and it didn’t have to change its image to get there.
Who will be poker's Shaun White?But just like snowboarding, poker’s maverick streak, its personality and independent spirit, doesn’t have to be crushed under the boot of corporate sponsorship.
In fact, mainstream exposure and an expanding fan base will only help grow the personalities in the game.
“If anything the personalities in snowboarding are even bigger now because of the cult of personality and being able to reach the mainstream,” said Birke.
“Like Shaun White who’s this sort of larger-than-life individual that’s essentially a product of snowboarding becoming mainstream.”
The bridge from poker to true mainstream audiences will come from the new generation of elite poker pros, and it will come in the form of someone with the same ‘coolness’ factor and ability that puts Shaun White posters on kids’ walls around the world.
The poker world needs a savvy poker pro capable of doing amazing things at the poker table. We need someone successful and cool enough that fans want to engage and emulate.
Players like Tom Dwan and Viktor Blom fit the bill and with the introduction of newer, high profile leagues like Epic, they just might have a chance.
Click through here to read the full interview with Annie Duke.
Any suggestions for a future 3-Bet, feel free to drop a note in the comments.
Today in the 3-Bet we find PokerStars pro Shane Schleger swinging through the month of February, a 103-year old poker player still going strong and Sir Phillip Ivey shows up in another poker meme.
1) The Ups and Downs of Being PokerStars Pro Shane Schleger Swongs.Want to know what a month in the life of a high-level online poker tournament pro is like?
Check out the graph posted by PokerStars Team Online Pro Shane Schleger on his twitter account today.
Schleger managed to get himself down about $26k after 530ish tourneys before winning around $24k in the next 20 or so to help him snap back on the road to even.
Goes to show at the higher end of the buy-in spectrum you can be in for a lot of variance before you bink the score you need to pay the bills each month.
Still, while being down $26k can’t be fun if you’re rolled properly and have the skills, that big, long straight spike is bound to come.
Capping off his month, Schleger says he'll be playing the $10k live LAPC Main Event starting this Friday.
PokerListings will be on the scene for some live reporting so check back on Friday for news and blogs.
2) If That’s What it Takes to Get a Taj Visor, We’ll Do ItStudies have been kicking around in the scientific community lately that show older people who keep their brains active can help ward off Alzheimers.
Specifically, card playing is highlighted as one of the most effective and enjoyable ways to do it.
A 2009 French study that included 5,000 participants has even shown that doing mental activities like playing cards twice a week led to a 50% risk reduction for all forms of dementia.
Bad ass visor, still going strong.Andy Amatrudo is living proof.
Yesterday Amatrudo celebrated his 103rd birthday in the poker room at the Trump Taj Mahal, which he calls his “second home.”
“I’ve lived next door and I’m here every day, seven days a week,” Amatrudo told NBC10 Philadelphia. “I get charged up when I play cards, it keeps me going, I love to play poker!”
Amatrudo says he’s been playing cards since he was eight or nine years old. He takes no medication at all at 103 and he's still as sharp as ever - including at the tables.
As one player says, "When he raises he's got the goods.”
We should all be so lucky. Happy birthday Andy.
3) 12 Hours in an Underground Card Room with Paul PierceKeeping to our theme of being 2-3 months (or years as the case may be) behind on Internet memes, we found this one yesterday.
The "Shit XXXX Says" idea was played out before it even started but somehow Johnny Fondue here managed to squeeze a bit of smirk-worthy comedy out of it.
Weisner, who is off to a strong start in 2012 with several deep runs in Aussie Millions events, finished with 368,200 chips, tops amongst the 72 players remaining in the contest.
Although Weisner has yet to score a major title, she has shown the ability to build a big stack on numerous occasions including the 2011 WSOPE Main Event where she finished 33rd.
Weisner won a 100k pot against Dane Lars Hansen to take the chip lead in the latter part of Day 2. She turned the nut-straight against Hansen and somehow managed to get paid off on the river.
As expected the leaderboard is littered with Scandinavians including Simon Ravnsbaek, Aage Ravn and Michael Tureniec who are all in the top 20.
Team PokerStars Pro Pierre Neuville is also in the top 20 with 221,000 chips. A total of four Team PokerStars Pros will see the light of Day 3 including Luca Pagano, Johnny Lodden and Martin Staszko.
Some of the other notables remaining in the 72-player field include Steve O’Dwyer, Mads Wissing, Juha Helppi, Albert Iverson, Mickey Petersen and Jan Molby.
Marcel Bjerkmann, Theo Jorgensen and Anton Wigg were among the 59 eliminations that took place on Day 2.
This year’s EPT Copenhagen drew 299 players to create a prizepool of 10,046,400 (DKK). First place will walk away with 2,515,000 (DKK) or $448,100 USD.
Day 3 promises to be an exciting one with the money bubble set to burst at 48 players left. It all begins tomorrow at 12:00 p.m. local time.
At least $1 million is guaranteed for the champ despite the buy-in remaining the same as always at $215.
Players can as usual buy a seat in the event with FPPs or through a variety of satellites from as low as $1.
A special 1,000-seat guaranteed satellite has also been added to run on the 11th before the Sunday Million kicks off.
Feeder satellites for that event also start from only $1. To buy-in directly to the Sunday Million or find a satellite, check the PokerStars lobby under Tourney>>Special.
Last year's fifth anniversary Sunday Million likewise offered a $5 million guarantee plus a Lamborghini Gallardo.
The event smashed its guaranteed with a massive 59,128 players and an $11,825,600 prize pool.
Luke "Bdbeatslayer" Vrabel took home the top prize of $671,093.81 plus the Lamborghini.
To sign up for a PokerStars with our exclusive bonus code, check our PokerStars review page.
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