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Caesars Building Partnerships with Global Gaming Brands
This week Caesars Interactive Entertainment (CIE) announced that they extended two existing partnerships. CIE has been working on building the World Series of Poker brand online this year in regulated markets. The new partnerships will ensure that the WSOP brand is further marketed online in regulated markets.
Caesars Extends 888 Partnership
888 Poker has been proving software to the current WSOP online poker room. The WSOP online poker room isn’t available in the United States yet. The new partnership will … Read the rest
Barry Denson Plans to Set New Record for Playing Poker for the Longest
Barry Denson, a poker player from the UK, has announced that he plans to set a new record for playing poker for the longest. On the 1st of July, he will play at G Casino, Manchester. The game will go on for five days. Most of Denson’s activity at the felt has been in live poker league tournaments.
Help for Heroes, a charitable organization that assists injured people in the armed forces, will benefit from the money made during the … Read the rest
Card Rush Promotion Running at PartyPoker
PartyPoker is running an attractive promotion called Card Rush in February. It will start on the 1st and continue for the rest of the month. Real money players of the site will have an exclusive opportunity to win prizes and freeroll entries through the promotion.
Card Rush promotion operates in a simple manner. Every time a player earns 15 Party Points, the poker site rewards him with a Card Rush ticket. On scratching the card, prizes are revealed. Every card … Read the rest
Main Event Final Table To Be Delayed 4 Months
Good luck to everyone who will be playing at this year’s main event at the World Series of Poker. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, the final table of the $10,000 NL Hold’em event is going to be delayed by several months this year.
The main event will begin as it does every year. Only this year, the players will play down to the final table when the tournament will be stopped for a period of about 4 months. During this time, all of the final table participants will be followed around by cameras so that the viewing public has the opportunity to “Get to know” the players before they play at the final table. It sounds to me like they are going to try and turn this into more of a reality t.v show than a poker tournament.
It seems like the majority of poker players are against this decision. It’s going to have a lot of unintended consequences on the way the final table is played. For starters, all of the players will have been able to watch the ESPN footage (with hole card cams) leading up to the final table, before it is actually played. Not to mention that some of these players may have an extra 10 million dollar contract on the line which would provide plenty of opportunities to work out deals behind closed doors.
You could come up with scores of reasons why this was a bad decision, but these are mostly all reasons that pertain to the players at the final table. As someone who isn’t even going to be playing in the main event this year, my main interest is in the way that ESPN covers the event. We have seen in the past with champions like Chris Moneymaker, that coverage of this event can have a drastic effect on the poker world. Just as I mentioned above, it appears as though they are following a model that has been proven to increase ratings in other genres of television broadcasting.
I hate to see a tournament structure altered to improve television ratings, but in the long run I think this could be a good thing for poker. Sponsors will be getting a lot more exposure time, and hopefully the new layout will help to attract a new audience as well. In the end, this could result in a lot more money for players everywhere. Perhaps in 2009 we could have a main event that has more than 10K entrants.
