09 Feb 12

The Death of Poker Sponsorship? Part 1

With the face of online poker changing at such an accelerated rate, Barry Carter asks, is the current poker sponsorship model outdated?

The end of the poker patch?

Poker is changing dramatically right now - the game is getting regulated, social media is finally starting to come into the picture, and every poker room is looking at ways in which to make the poker economy healthier.

We had a fantastic blog this week from our CEO, Dominik Kofert, on his vision for the future of poker, in which he envisions a future where poker is marketed as a hobby and entertainment, rather than a sport or career.

Many poker rooms are introducing initiatives that penalize winning players, or at least, reward recreational players more. Elsewhere, many of the former "heroes" of poker are dramatically falling from grace, in particular, those embroiled in the Full Tilt scandal.

For whatever reason, the high profile professional player is no longer the centre of the poker universe.

Which compels me to ask, what is the point of poker rooms sponsoring players anymore? We are constantly hearing about the profits of poker rooms declining year on year, yet many rooms still insist on investing heavily on sponsoring players to wear their patch for them at tournaments.

What do sponsored players bring to a poker room?

The Hendon Mob were early pioneers of poker sponsorship

In hindsight, using part of your marketing budget to freeroll someone into poker tournaments seemed pretty silly in 99% of the cases. For years it was the knee-jerk reaction of any aspiring new poker room to go out and put a patch on a reasonably successful player - it was just something that people did, without really questioning why.

What actual value is derived from sponsoring someone to play poker? There are a handful of players out there who could, in 2012, possibly influence someone to play on a site by representing it - the likes of Daniel Negreanu, Tony G, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson - and that list is decreasing all the time. Not many other poker players have a genuine fan-base like this, or what we can really call "star power".

Beyond the players who are regularly on TV and are actually well known by the mainstream audience, what actual value do the vast majority of "I-won-an-EPT-sponsored-players" bring to the table?

They don't attract new players to the game, because most of them are complete nobodies outside of poker, so they could be anyone to a non poker player watching them on TV. 

Likewise, what value do they have to existing poker players? The chances are that anyone who has been playing poker for a while has already made their choices where to play, based on software, softness, VIP deals, traffic etc. If, all of a sudden, sponsored player X takes down the next leg of the WPT, I may find that interesting, but it will not in any way influence where I decide to play poker.

As a player, I am much more interested in the things I have mentioned above that concerned me. If I am going to switch poker rooms, or play more on an existing one, it is going to be increased rakeback, bigger guarantees, softer games, better promotions, or improved software that will do it.

The Black Friday effect

Could the FTP sponsorship model ever be sustainable again?

Which brings me onto why I can't see the traditional poker sponsorship model surviving in 2012. Not only is the community only concerned with the parts of the poker room that affect them, the modern poker player wants to know where their money is going. Black Friday shined a worrying light on what was happening in the back offices of online poker rooms, where our money was, and how it was being used.

We want our rake going back into promotions, software, rakeback, and marketing to bring new players to the table. I feel it was going this way anyway before Black Friday, but the perception of sponsored players by the poker community in the future will probably be "why is that guy playing with our money?" - and after the whole Full Tilt debacle, can you blame us?

I think part of the widespread acceptance of sponsorship in the past was probably down to a flawed sense of deserving. Sponsored players were perceived as being accomplished, talented and hard-working; we didn't question why they got to play on our dime, because we felt their superior poker abilities meant they deserved to wear the patch.

This just does not wash anymore. The integrity of poker players is being scrutinised more than ever, no longer are they worshipped or idolised. Many former heroes have become villains since Black Friday, especially the ones who are thought to have benefited at the expense of all the players with money stuck on Full Tilt.

Full Tilt's entire model was built around sponsored players, their hook-line was "play with the pros" after all, and when they went down, there were about 250 sponsored players on their books. When you consider many of the traditional sponsorship deals are worth in the region of $100k a year, is there any wonder the site imploded like it did with figures like that?

In 2012, the only real benefactors from the traditional poker sponsorship model is the sponsored players themselves. I hope that the community would never stand for another sponsorship model like FTP's again, and instead urged poker rooms to put more of our rake into the things that bring new players to the tables, and our own experience much more enjoyable.

Finally, before I receive a sackful of hate mail and angry tweets from the hundreds of sponsored players out there - I will be following this up with a second part, which will focus on the sponsorship deals that still have value in 2012.

by Barry Carter