Is the poker industry overlooking cash game players?
With all the attention and promotion around recent record breaking online and live tournaments, are cash game grinders being under served?
At the start of every year I do a feature where I make predictions for the poker year ahead (this is the 2018 version and I think I did quite well this year) but I don’t mind giving you a sneak peak at one of my 2019 predictions, and that is we will see a seven-figure pot at Trickett’s Room at partypoker (which is a weekly nosebleed cash game).
We haven’t seen seven-figure pots online since the days of Rail Heaven in 2009 and I don’t think we are about to see the resurgence of nosebleed cash games. I actually think it will be an outlier and essentially a publicity stunt – partypoker have hosted the biggest MTT of all time I suspect they will want to do something similar with their cash games.
partypoker zig when the rest of the industry zags, and for the most part cash games are forming less of a poker room’s marketing and promotional budget. Just look at the massive events from PokerStars (the PSPC) and partypoker (MILLIONS Online), it has been like the entire industry only cares about tournaments these days. A point which Joe Ingram vented some frustration about recently:
Takeaway: @Joeingram1 may have said it best: "All we're seeing on twitter is tournaments, tournaments, fucking tournaments." Are we saturated with live and online MTTs? can a nobody binking a big MTT ever match the same level of engagement as bigname players trading huge pots?
— Nick Jones (@pokerprojones) November 29, 2018
A marketable narrative
The simple fact is that tournaments are so much easier to organically market than cash games. The end prizes are much bigger, people like the idea of trophies and being a ‘champion’, people who are new to the game instinctively understand what it means to bust, or bubble, or come back from a short stack, or make the final table.
You only have to look at how popular tournaments are on Twitch to see this obvious appeal. There is a natural narrative in a tournament, a ‘hero’s journey’, that is easy to follow. Will our hero make it? Wow, that hurt when he bust! And when a streamer makes a deep run in a big event their numbers go up and up. This is why Lex Veldhuis is so popular, you are really with him for every victory and every bad beat.
It’s simply not that easy to do for cash games. A massive pot is always appealing but most of the time there is a lot of waiting between hands for something dramatic to happen. Getting felted doesn’t mean the same thing because you can just reload. This is why there hasn’t been a particularly successful cash game streamer on Twitch yet.
Cash games need to be high stakes
The only time cash games were particularly good at marketing poker, in my opinion, were the legendary battles at Rail Heaven in 2009 and the show High Stakes Poker. High Stakes Poker was special in that it really felt like a sneak peak into the world of nosebleed poker, complete with table talk and prop bets. However, the common factor with both of them was the sheer size of the money on the table. People will watch, in awe, when pots the size of houses take place in front of them. In that respect, I think the only way to make cash games marketable as entertainment is by increasing the stakes.
The other way to give cash games a shot in the arm is by enhancing the VIP benefits a player gets for putting in the volume. This is where we run into the issue the industry has been grappling with for some time now, which is most operators believe that high volume play and big rakeback deals hurt the ecosystem of a poker room. So I suspect this is a non-starter.
Cash games are also arguably fighting a battle with Lottery SNGs like Spin & Go. One of the appeals of cash games was you could play as little or as long as you wanted, whether it was ten minutes or ten hours. You can now do the same thing with a Spin & Go but there is also the slim chance of playing for a massive multiplier.
I don’t think cash games are in trouble by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just they will never be as easy to market as tournaments. The good news, I suppose, for cash game grinders is that the more the industry focusses on tournaments, the worse the tournament players who try their hand at cash games will be when they bust out.
What can the industry do to make cash games more marketable? Let us know in the comments:
