The Global Poker Awards needs a strategy category
Barry Carter thinks there are already too many GPI Awards, but strategy content and online poker is way overlooked.
It's poker awards season, which means it is time for everyone in the industry to lament how unrepresentative the Global Poker Awards are of the wider industry.
A few people have kindly commented to me (thanks Mom) that it is ludicrous that my 70,000-page book is not nominated for the Written Content category and that single 2,000-word articles are. Many have said to me over the years that 'Poker Book' should be its own category.
While that would suit me, I tend to surprise people when I tell them I think there should not be a book category. If we start fragmenting the categories down that much, the awards ceremony will take 9 hours. I actually think there should be fewer media and staff categories full stop, it should be more about the players. I also think we should not take the awards seriously and treat them as a bit of fun.
There are too many GPI Awards
So I would reduce the amount of poker content creation back scratching, with one exception. For an awards ceremony with too many awards for content creation, there are no awards for strategy content. Strategy content is the majority of poker content, it just isn't necessarily the type of content those involved with the voting panel consume.
Like it or not, strategy content is the only poker content people pay for. I am classing PokerGO live events as a form of strategy content here too, it has world-class commentators dissecting the play of world-class players after all. Strategy content is almost certainly the first form of poker content we all consumed, even if it was simply a guide to the starting hands.
I count 10 of 22 awards being content related, yet not a single one of them is strategy content. Some of the nominees in the categories are strategy content creators - the Vlogger, Streamer and Podcast categories all include at least one nominee for whom their content is strategy related.
Online poker is also overlooked
Why is it that strategy content is so far out of the mix? I think it is mostly due to the demography of the voting panel. Most of the people involved with these panels are US-based and live poker-focused (online poker is also completely left out of these awards but that is another debate for another time). Most of the behemoths of poker strategy are online grinders who spend a lot of their year running sims at home.
I respectfully suggest that most of the people on the voting panel, other than the pro players, don't really know their way around PIOSolver, or what 'node-locking' is, or have subscriptions to RaiseYourEdge or DTO, or a PokerTracker account. This is not a criticism, just an observation. Poker is so atomized these days that we all have blind spots.
As much as I'd love to beg for a 'Poker Book' award, I do truly believe that there are too many content awards. The GPI Awards needs less media categories, but certainly needs at least one online category (maybe two, player and operator) and a strategy content award. I'd much rather my books be competing with the solvers and training sites than the non-strategy written articles, even though it is just as much of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
How would you change the GPI Awards? Let us know in the comments:
