Poker should sponsor more older players
Following the news Barny Boatman was signed by PokerStars at 68, Barry Carter thinks we should be doing more to attract seniors to the game.
This week PokerStars sponsored Barny Boatman, who became the oldest player ever to win an EPT at 68.
I think Stars sponsored Boatman for the reason everyone else likes him. He is a great player, a great ambassador, a great guy and is very funny.
However, it is nice to see the rarest of things, an older player getting online poker sponsorship. The landscape of sponsorship has changed significantly in the last 20 years, but for the most part the game has been marketed towards the young.
I think this has been one of the great marketing errors in poker, and I am glad to see PokerStars take a step towards changing it.
We need more disposable incomes
Marketing the game exclusively to the young made sense at one unique stage of the game, the poker boom. This was a rare time when poker was so easy and instant play bonus deals were so generous because we had so much money coming into the game. Young college kids really could forge a career with little to no financial investment.
We no longer live in those times and now marketing poker to 21-year-olds does not make sense, because they don't have money. To grow the game of poker we need to market it to people with disposable income and time on their hands. Older players are much more likely to fall into that category.
You only need to look at the growth of Seniors Events to see this. They were once a novelty event just at the WSOP, now they break records every year. Last year's Seniors event attracted 8,180 players, which would be an impressive Main Event field. Now most tours have a Seniors event, we even have Super Seniors events, and this year the WSOP has also announced a High Roller Seniors event.
In this respect, it would be more of a niche event to have an under-30s tournament at the WSOP, than an over 50s.
A ripe audience
I've noticed it myself with my book work. Dara O'Kearney (An older player himself who has talked about this at length) and I started to observe a couple of years ago that the average age of our book audience is probably mid 40s with lots of people in their 50s. Specifically, players who were once into the game, fell out with a bit, and were now interested in learning the modern solver approach to the game.
None of this is to say we should exclude younger players from marketing. We need young players more than ever for the longevity of the game. How we attract more of them is a very tough question.
What I am saying is older players are low-hanging fruit, they are a ripe audience ideal for the game because they have time and money. We have ignored them from our marketing for too long.
Should poker do more to attract older players? Let us know in the comments:
