The Tour Wars
Just how many poker players are there out there who are prepared to come up with $10,000 for one of these main events on yet another tour? Surely, with the World Poker Tour and the WSOP Circuit events overlapping each other’s schedules, and both offering $10,000 main events, the players have to decide which tour to back.
So what are the players looking for? Well, a fair deal of course. The players want corporate sponsorships so they don’t have to fund the $10,000 events themselves and allow the tours to reap the rewards of the television deals. The players want those deals, too, but they are restricted by logo wear – or lack of, as the case may be.
Now, we all know that the online poker sites offer amazing promotions that allow us to win some of these $10,000 seats to these main events, but how are the sites going to feel if no logos are allowed on the televised shows at all? There may be a possibility that they will just have to give their online players the money and hope they show up at the event, with the knowledge that they will probably not be wearing their T-shirts or caps.
So are the online promotions for these events about to come to an abrupt end? And if this is the case, what will happen to the large fields we have seen at these live events? Will they decline or will they continue to grow? Sure, poker players have egos and want to see themselves on the television, but surely there is only so many $10,000 buy-ins they can stand.
Maybe the tours themselves will have to make more seats available via all-year-round international satellites to compensate the lack of online qualifiers being sent their way.
We have already seen some of the players joining together to boycott certain events in order to make their voices heard, but where would these players be today if it were not for the vision of Steve Lipscombe and Lyle Berman? Would they be earning big dollars for television commercials or stopped in the street for autographs? I don’t think so.
I agree that the time is now right for another tour to come along and change the way things are done, as the existing tours are limited in their television deals and logo restrictions. If another tour can take the lessons of the existing ones and open themselves up to allow corporate sponsorship to sponsor the players, then I feel that primetime television would be delighted to take a tour sponsored by a household brand and not a dot net or a dot com.
Over the coming months, I will be making comparisons between the various tours that are currently operating (and the people behind them). The facts will clearly show which tour, or tours, the players are backing, and I will try to identify why.
Many would say that poker players have no right to complain, but why shouldn’t they when golf players who dedicate their lives to staying at the top of their profession can command higher dollars from sponsorship deals than they do from winning events. The life of a professional poker player is a dedicated one, and one that relies heavily on financial support through good and bad. So surely it would make sense for the players who are consistently in the top 100 to boost their income through sponsorship deals and merchandise branding – just like other sports personalities.
Let’s wait and see who’ll win this battle of the tours. Will it be the WPT with the help of the well-known casinos, Harrah’s with their own huge network of casinos in the USA – or will it be the online poker sites by themselves? I know where my money is…
