Why poker awards always cause controversy
Barry Carter thinks the Global Poker Awards were a success but explains why awards in a game like poker will always lead to arguments.
The most thankless task in the poker industry is probably live poker tournament reporter. The hours are very long, it can be very tedious and you only get feedback when you make a mistake. The second most thankless task must be poker awards organiser.
Last weekend the Global Poker Awards took place and it looked like a very fun very well produced affair, and some of the winners really deserved their gongs. However this year (and to be fair, every year) all people could talk about was who was left out of the nominations and how it was hard to compare a lot of the people up for the same award.
For example Poker Content of the Year, which included a 300 page book and a single photograph. To even contemplate comparing the two seems futile, they are so objectively different.
Too many categories?
Herein lies the first of many problems with poker awards. The only solution to such a quandary is to have more awards, one for photography and one for books (as well as one for documentaries, one for articles, and we already have categories for podcast, Vlogs and streams). You run into the same problem for all the other types of categories, how do you compare a live MTT grinder to an online PLO cash specialist? How do you compare a casino in Rozvadov to one in Las Vegas?
There are already 20 categories, if we make the awards any more granular they would go on for weeks. So we are left with the issue that too many awards dilute the prestige of them, but reducing the number of awards leaves us comparing apples to oranges. I hate to say it because it is ‘my people’ but there are probably too many categories for people who create content compared to playing poker.
So when you do reduce the potential categories, invariably what happens is the nominations and ultimate winners tend to be the more 'visible' contestants. The awards are already massively skewed towards live tournaments because as an industry that is where the easiest stories to pick out are and all the marketing money goes. It’s perfectly feasible that somebody in Macau cash games quietly won more money than Justin Bonomo did last year but we simply do not know. Likewise there could be a player bossing online PLO across a number of networks and we don’t even know their screennames. Then clearly there is an American bias in these and most other global awards.
Too many metrics
I’ve written about this before, but because the industry is so atomised now and there are so many potential awards, it is unrealistic to expect those on the panels to know everyone and especially the metrics they should be judged on. This is why you got the confusing situation where Brad Owen didn’t even make the Vlogger shortlist (because a lot of people don’t know the YouTube scene) and Joe Ingram was left off the podcast shortlist (because of differences on the definition of ‘podcast’).
I was on the European Poker Awards panel for years and I would have to explain to fellow panelists things like SharkScope, HighStakesDB and PocketFives to give them an idea what precisely the online players were being judged on. Likewise if you are clueless about Twitch, do you judge a streamer on views, subs, hours broadcast or something else?
This may all sound that I am down on poker awards, nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been involved in a poker awards panel of some description every year for a decade because I believe they are fun and a celebration of a great industry. I think the Global Poker Awards are a big step in the right direction too and an improvement on previous iterations. I just am very aware of the limitations and selection biases that will always be present when you judge on vague qualities, rather than hard numbers.
At best poker awards are a snapshot of some of the positives in poker. It's clearly a good thing that we have more deserving nominees than any one person can name.
What are your thoughts on the awards? Let us know in the comments:
