The Global Poker League’s First Finale (Finally)

The Global Poker League’s first season is finally coming to an end with their playoffs running this week in “the Cube” in Las Vegas.

Way back when this first season of the GPL got going back in late March, the plan then was apparently to stage this finale at the SSE Arena, Wembley where (presumably) there’d be a big live audience on hand to watch it all.

There were a lot of particulars having to do with this first season that hadn’t been pinned down then, actually, and at the time I think most were a little skeptical that there actually would be some sort of season-punctuating event attended by thousands.

In May came news that the playoffs would be starting in late September-early October and be played at the TwitchCon 2016 event in San Diego, then finished up at Wembley in November. That plan was eventually scrapped, then in early August we heard the playoffs would be happening this week in a Las Vegas studio.

So it’s a decidedly less spectacular spectacle, but still all being streamed live on Twitch for those who are curious. Yesterday the sucker went on for more than 15 hours before the Montreal Nationals emerged as the Americas Conference champs.

I tuned in occasionally, and will probably do so again today as the Eurasia Conference gets decided, then tomorrow for the championship. It remains kind of a challenging watch for more than short stretches. Still, I’m glad to see them managing to see this first season through, and there something kind of entertaining about the playoff format.

Have to imagine Season 2 will be scaled back considerably, though, the eight-month grind (with the breaks) being a bit too lengthy to keep the attention of most. There remains all sorts of challenges, really, making it hard to imagine poker working as a genuine spectator sport, sans the “reality TV”-type bells and whistles that has made it work in other formats and incarnations.

Image: Global Poker League.

The Game-Watching Game

Vera and I spent a nice quiet Thanksgiving on the farm yesterday watching a lot of football. Then today we spent some time driving around visiting family and enjoying leftovers.

Got to hang a little with my nephew, which is always fun. He’s seven-and-a-half now, and as usual during our reunions he introduced me to his current interests.

One was a new app he’s enjoying called My Singing Monsters which he insisted I download on my phone, too. Sort of a funny game with a creative element involving arranging “monsters” you’ve collected in ways that allow them to sing repetitive, catchy songs together.

He’s also handy on YouTube these days, and introduced Vera and I to a couple of his new favorites.

One is this nutty series of shorts called “The Annoying Orange” which I believe started out as a web-only thing before eventually becoming a series on the Cartoon Network. (And no, in case you’re wondering, it isn’t about the president-elect.) One of the videos just involved characters from the show playing a video game and commenting over it, my nephew giggling all of the way. That one is pictured above -- has over 6.8 million views!

Another are these videos made by an English fellow (I didn’t catch the name) that seem to involve him just acting funny on camera while sitting at his desk. Kind of minimal, but super-popular apparently as indicated by the huge views he gets.

I’m not sure what the standard format of the latter is, but the videos we saw all involved him kind of challenging himself to guess which of two choices would be the most popular in a “Would You Rather?”-type game. Stuff like “Would you rather spend five years in prison and then get a million dollars when released or never go to prison and not get any money?” He made his decisions entertaining by forcing himself to eat sour candy (and make lots of faces) should he choose the less popular of the two.

My nephew thought he was hilarious, and while I wasn’t laughing as much I think the target audience has to be kids. I found myself thinking how similar the dude’s videos were to ones produced by those playing online poker on Twitch, at least formally.

In both cases, the audience is basically watching someone play a game while trying to make it compelling viewing in some way. Both combine entertainment and education, too, via game show-like structures (or at least they can). And of course, in both cases the performer has figured out a way to monetize the performance.

We play games for a variety of reasons. There are a lot of different motivations for watching others play them, too, some of which make the games themselves somewhat incidental.

Something to think about, I guess, as I go back to watching football this weekend.

No Money in Wacky Usernames, Everyone Is Solid

Chuckling here over the latest report of a big winner on PokerStars’ Spin & Go game, this time over on the French site where a trio of players entering a €25 game hit a lucky spin and got to play for €300,000, with €250K of that going to the winner (and the losers each getting a nice consolation prize of €25K).

The story is interesting in part because the fellow who won the sucker, a Russian player, was streaming on Twitch at the time, and so the entire short tournament he was on camera, going through the emotions of first realizing how big the prize was, then talking to himself (and his viewers) with increasing animation as the tournament played out.

In its report on the win, PokerStars has embedded a short video of the fellow’s Twitch stream showing the Spin & Go, with Team PokerStars Pro Online’s Mikhail “innerpsy” Shalamov providing commentary and translation.

It’s a fun watch. He luckily wins a big all-in with 7-6 versus K-Q, then soon has the other opponent at risk with pocket fours against his A-2. The flop comes 3-5-K, then a four on the turn gives him a straight. The river is a blank, and he wins the €250K (pictured above -- click to enlarge).

His reaction is pretty great, as you might imagine -- literal jumping for joy, followed by some genuine tears as his tremendous fortune starts sinking in. I’ve seen references to it being the biggest single online poker win ever streamed on Twitch -- in fact, I think it breaks the previous high by a wide margin.

The part of the story, though, that has gotten the most attention is the fellow’s username on the PokerStars.fr site -- “SolidPenis.”

No shinola. Not since “RectalRash” won a SCOOP five years ago -- the win memorialized by Dr. Pauly in a post headlined “RectalRash irritates field en route to Triple Draw victory” -- has there been a more embarrassing username that had to be reported.

Just as the Russian fellow this week apparently set a new standard for online poker-playing Twitch streamers, he’s also probably established a new, hard-to-surpass standard for ignominious IDs.

Image: PokerStars blog.

Grocery Run (It UP)

Had kind of a funny thing happen this afternoon.

Made a quick trip to the grocery store just to pick up some milk and a couple of other items, and as I was walking down an aisle I thought I saw a fellow pass on the other side wearing a black t-shirt with the “Run It UP” logo across the front -- that is, the name of Jason Somerville’s popular Twitch channel.

I actually doubted I had seen it at first, thinking it very likely I’d imagined it. But me and the fellow ended up circling around to meet again over in dairy, and sure enough I was right.

I had to say something. After all, I’m not exactly writing to you from a hotbed of poker, located as I am a little under 2,200 miles from Las Vegas where everyone’s attention is trained these days.

I asked the fellow if he played poker, and he said he did although considered himself more a fan than a player. He’d actually just gotten back from Vegas where he’d played some low buy-in daily tournaments and railed a bit at the WSOP. I shared with him a very short version of my poker story, and we talked a bit further about Somerville’s Twitch stream, Jason Mercier’s hot summer, the ongoing $50K event, and the upcoming Main.

The encounter made an otherwise mundane trip to the store more enjoyable, and I think he got a kick out of the conversation, too. I had to let Somerville know over Twitter, and he liked hearing about it as well.

We get so spread out -- even if we’re all connected online as we are -- it’s easy to forget how poker can provide that avenue to meeting new people and building communities (something Somerville has managed with great success via Run It UP).

Image: Run It UP Store.

Summer’s Coming

The World Series of Poker gets started in a little over a week, with the first of 69 bracelet events starting on June 1 (the $565 buy-in Casino Employees Event).

I watched that “Twitch Town Hall” last week hosted by the WSOP “brass” (as my buddy Mo Nuwwarah likes to refer to them). To be honest, I had it on but ended up getting distracted by other things as the sound was muddy and it was occasionally hard to follow. Seems to be a common thing on Twitch when folks don’t use microphones but rather just the internal mics in laptops. (It is often listenable enough with earbuds, but I don’t always want to use those.)

I did pick up on the fact that they were answering a lot of questions about this year’s “Colossus” (or “Colossus II,” as they’re dubbing it), mostly to do with registration concerns. Sounds like they think it’ll be even bigger than the 22,374-entry field from last year, which is nuts.

There was other stuff having to do with the WSOPE and WSOP APAC (both up in the air, it sounds like), the WSOP POY and the GPI working on a better formula, the earlier start times, Uber, All-American Dave, and so on. But nothing huge to get excited or bothered about, from what I could tell.

There will be some good stories again this summer, as there always are. The whole enterprise has definitely grown to the point now that it feels more like a big lumbering machine -- even more so than just five or seven years ago, I think. And with all of the other tours circling the globe to keep each week -- each day, even -- filled with tourney talk, the WSOP has definitely become less central, though still unique.

Photo: “Temperature,” Jan. CC BY 2.0.

GPL Moves Into Third Week

Was busy for much of yesterday although by late afternoon I was able to switch on the Global Poker League and watch the 6-max matches go by.

They’ve now introduced webcams for those (a couple of players at a time) as well as some “postgame” interviews with players, all of which adds considerably to what would otherwise be a fairly dry watch of an online sit-n-go. I also feel like there’s something genuinely interesting -- and perhaps even unique -- when it comes to the players’ attempts at analyzing hands on the fly.

I’ve never much gotten into watching the single-player streams on Twitch in which a player tries to do what he or she can to engage an audience, and perhaps offer some strategy advice along the way. Many of those often seem to be “about” cheering for a player to go deeper in a tournament or build a stack on a cash table, which can be interesting if you care about the player but otherwise is not terribly compelling.

Meanwhile on the GPL streams players are perhaps in a bit more vulnerable position when it comes to offering on-the-fly analysis. For one thing, viewers can see everyone’s hole cards (whereas the player obviously cannot), a big distinction from the Twitch streams in which those watching can only see the channel host’s cards. Thus we hear the player talking through decisions knowing whether or not his or her reads of others’ ranges are accurate, which in turn gives us a better idea how such decision-making works (or doesn’t).

I think also there’s much less of an “us-versus-them” feel to the GPL streams as opposed to other poker streams on Twitch. Sure, we might well have a rooting interest, and curiosity about outcomes and who wins and who loses also obviously motivates a person to watch. But I’m finding my attention shifting a lot as I follow the different players’ thoughts about the hands their playing, occasionally expressed by multiple players within the same hand.

The last couple of matches today (involving the “Americas Conference”) were fun, too, thanks in part to Tyler Kenney (Bryn’s brother) and Felipe “Mojave” Ramos both getting to heads-up and splitting the victories.

Both players were “wild cards” added to their respective teams (the New York Rounders for Kenney and the São Paulo Metropolitans for Ramos), and both were clearly very excited to do well in their GPL debuts. They both tended toward the “fit-or-fold” style of play (as noted by commentator Sam Grafton along the way), which I think many of us who consider ourselves recreational players also often employ, adding perhaps another layer of interest to following their progress.

The excitement level varies quite a bit, of course, with these GPL shows, and I’ll admit during certain stretches finding myself wandering away when it fails to engage. But I do think there’s something genuinely different about the shows compared to other poker TV, and so for now -- while the novelty remains fresh, anyway -- I’m continuing to dial them up.

Image: Global Poker League.

GPL Week 1 Provides Fun, Instruction

Just a quick follow-up today to Wednesday’s post in which I shared some initial impressions from the first day of the Global Poker League Week 1 shows.

Have to admit I very much enjoyed watching the GPL on Wednesday and Thursday when the attention turned to heads-up matches. Having webcams on the players added a lot, and things got even better when some of them began talking strategy as the hands were playing out.

I ended up writing something over on PokerNews about how watching the GPL Twitch stream, besides being occasionally entertaining, also appears to be a good way to learn a bit of strategy, too: “Strategy on the Stream: Learning by Watching the Global Poker League.”

I know those who paid any attention at all to the 25 hours or so of poker they showed this week are moving quickly to make judgments on whatever bit they saw -- which more often than not seems to have been just a short bit of the first day -- and perhaps draw some conclusions about the whole idea of the GPL, too. It’s understandable, really, given the ambitious talk surrounding the league to respond with thoughts about whether or not those ambitions are going to be realized. (Or if they even can be.)

Three hands in particular were great fun to watch -- one involving Daniel “Jungleman” Cates losing his stack in a cooler-type spot versus Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, another in which Justin Bonomo tanked for over four minutes following a river all-in by Timothy Adams (with both players sharing their reads during the tank), and third funny one in which Tom Marchese triple-barrel bluffed and hilariously walked away from the computer in a hand against Anthony Zinno.

To me these hands provided actual laugh-out-loud moments in addition to some genuinely interesting strategy talk. I highlighted them in the PokerNews article -- if you watched, or even if you didn’t, you can read what I had to say about them there.

The New York Rounders have taken an early lead in the Americas Conference, while the Hong Kong Stars sit stop the Eurasia Conference. Seeing how the teams fare going forward is another part of the story that I think might become increasingly interesting to follow going forward.

I have no idea whether the GPL is having or will have any effect on the non-poker playing crowd, or if it will manage to draw any small part of that group over onto the poker-playing side. But I will say I enjoyed watching poker this week as much or more than any other recent examples, outside of the WSOP Main Event, anyway.

By the way, everything is instantly archived over on the GPL site, if you’re curious to see any of it.

Image: Global Poker League.

Calling Up the GPL Feed

Major League Baseball had its opening day on Sunday, and for the first time I took the plunge and got the relatively cheap MLB At-Bat app that allows you (among other things) to listen to all the games. You even get to pick which team’s announcing crew you want to hear, and I’ve already had fun sampling a few of them.

I’ve also already realized I’ll only occasionally have time actually to listen to baseball games, but given the relatively cheap price of the app I’m not too bothered by that.

Meanwhile there was another opening day yesterday as the Global Poker League kicked off its inaugural season with live streaming of some six-max sit-n-gos played between representatives of the 12 GPL teams. I dialed up the Twitch channel on the Roku so it would play on the teevee while I worked on other things, and found it an enjoyable background hum that occasionally had me looking up as each of the SNGs got down to heads-up before concluding.

Can’t say I focused too intently on Griffin Benger and Sam Grafton’s commentary, although it seemed enjoyable when I did. I thought Laura Cornelius and Eric Danis did well, too, in the studio between matches, with their contributions helping to lend the proceedings the feeling of some kind of sporting event (a goal, I know, of the GPL and its attempt to “sportify” poker).

Watching an online tournament isn’t necessarily the most dynamic thing to witness, of course (and I say that as someone who has watched and reported on a lot of online poker over the years). The attention necessarily drifts, with only occasional hands standing out and most drifting past unnoticed.

Davidi Kitai made what seemed a remarkable fold on his way to winning the first SNG yesterday for the Paris Aviators. Dan “Jungleman” Cates, playing for the Berlin Bears, came in sixth of six in that initial match to earn his team zero points, then in the second one made a weird call of an all-in push by the Moscow Wolverines’ Dzmitry Urbanovich to lose most of his stack before taking sixth again.

Regarding the latter hand -- in which Cates instantly called the shove with J-8 (sooted!) -- Jungleman noted over Twitter that he didn’t mean to call the shove: “misread my hand in gpl, thought i had A9s somehow (j8s hand)... I was playing cash on side. Pretty tilting even though it's not for money...”

Some responded to that tweet by observing that it seemed to undercut the whole idea of the GPL a bit to have a player not giving the matches his full attention this way. Kind of thing does make it hard to compare folks playing online poker to actual sporting events. I mean we don’t see outfielders missing fly balls because they were checking Facebook or playing some other game on their phones.

In any case, it’s diverting and as I mentioned before my inner sports nerd delights in seeing early standings and statistics starting to build -- both for MLB and the GPL. Like baseball, it looks like from the GPL’s ambitious eight-month schedule they’ll be on the air pretty much all the time, too, for those of us curious enough (and having the time) to dip in to catch some of the action.

We’ll see how often I sample both feeds.

Image: Global Poker League.

Global Poker League… You’re on the Clock

Had that Global Poker League Twitch channel on the teevee during the afternoon and early evening, watching some of those American Poker Conference panels and then the draft for the Global Poker League.

Watching Twitch through the Roku is much, much better than on the laptop, I’ve discovered. For me Twitch never works properly via Safari, and while it plays okay on Chrome my laptop tends to run hot whenever I leave it on for a while. Meanwhile watching on television is a breeze, and so I was able to let the sucker play on over in the corner of the room while I worked on other things.

While my attention was coming and going, the panels were interesting and kind of reminded me a little of academic conferences from long ago where I gave my own presentations, listened to others’, and did the same sort of discussing and networking afterwards. Meanwhile the GPL draft similarly did a decent job of imitating the familiar, lengthy draft shows ESPN puts together for the NBA and NFL drafts. Kara Scott was even there to tell teams “you’re on the clock” when it was their turn to pick.

I’ve never much liked those other draft shows, mainly because I’ll know of only a few of the players being drafted (usually at the very start), making the rest of it kind of tedious. Meanwhile with this GPL draft I knew practically every player, team manager, and even the folks running back and forth in the background and turning up in random crowd shots, in many cases personally.

That alone made watching a little more fun. The team identities and logos are kind of interesting as well, and there is something kind of cool about a “global” league with various big cities represented around the world (four in the U.S., and one each in Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, and Russia).

Like many I’m still more than a little unclear about how the teams work, how the games will go, and the whole playing-while-standing-in-a-cube thing. There’s also the larger question of how exactly the GPL might invigorate poker, generally speaking, although with that I’m willing to exercise some patience. Gets a little fatiguing to keep hearing “stay tuned and find out,” but my curiosity about it all is certainly piqued enough to keep paying attention.

I will say this -- the apparent contrast between the GPL and the last attempt to create some kind of professional poker “league,” the ill-fated Epic Poker League, couldn’t be more stark.

Besides being incredibly short-sighted and impractical in the way it was run, the EPL from the start was purportedly about creating a context in which only the best could compete against the best. In other words, it was mostly about finding a way to keep others out the game.

The league’s commissioner Annie Duke introduced the EPL as “incredibly pro-centric” back in early 2011, arguing (unconvincingly) that the league would somehow represent “the one piece that’s kind of missing from the poker landscape right now... something for the best players in the world to compete against the best players in the world.”

Such an approach -- along with steep $20,000 buy-ins for events and fairly severe restrictions on who could enter them -- was enough to keep a lot of players away, then eventually the whole thing collapsed in on itself with the company that created the league declaring bankruptcy before a single season could be completed.

Meanwhile it’s clear that the Global Poker League seems to have a much different ethos, trying instead to be more inclusive and bring poker to a wider audience, if possible. The whole idea of having a league spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia is one indicator of such a mindset, and watching the draft yesterday there’s obviously a lot of focus on marketing and spreading positive messages about poker that go beyond just what the league itself and its teams will ultimately be doing.

Interestingly, the GPL used Global Poker Index rankings -- the lone piece of salvage remaining from the EPL wreckage -- to establish criteria for draft eligibility, having invited the top 1,000 ranked players to “opt in,” with a little over 200 doing so. The 48 players drafted yesterday came from that smaller group, and teams can now add two more players each as “wild cards” with no restrictions other than not being able to select any of the almost 800 who didn’t opt in for the draft. (That rule was implemented for the sake of fairness, not exclusion, as the GPL didn’t want top-ranked players to opt-out and then join teams later.)

We’ll see how it all goes and whether or not the GPL gathers any momentum in its own right, as well as whether it does produce these intended effects as described by entrepreneur and league founder Alex Dreyfus to help promote the game in positive ways. I’m intrigued about it, and as long as I can watch via my Roku I’ll probably do so once the season gets going.

Image: Global Poker League.

A Partial Information Game of Divided Attention

I’ve been spending a little bit of time off and on over the last couple of days watching Jason Somerville’s live streaming from the Aussie Millions over on his Twitch channel. Was up late last night doing other work, and so since the live stuff essentially happens overnight for those of us on Eastern time (and 16 hours behind Melbourne), it provided me a chance to keep the stream on as background.

Because I wasn’t wholly focused on watching the action, I was often just relying on Somerville’s (invariably good) commentary on hands, occasionally clicking on that tab to look up from my work and watch whenever it sounded like something interesting was going on. After a while I realized my own method was kind of emulating that of the players themselves who were playing at the feature table there on Day 2 of the Aussie Millions Main Event.

If you’ve watched any of the streaming, you know to what I’m referring. The action was on a half-hour delay, necessitated by the fact that the the hole cards were being shown. That meant most of those around the table were often looking at their phones at Somerville’s stream, taking advantage of the fact that they could learn more about how their opponents were playing by seeing their hole cards from earlier hands.

In other words, just like my own attention on the action was divided, so, too, was the attention of the players only partly on what was happening at that moment and otherwise focused on what went down a half-hour before, as revealed by the stream.

Somerville’s commentary was also sometimes incorporating the players’ discovery of each other’s hole cards from earlier hands. “It looks like Jeff Gross just found out he successively avoided Julius Colman’s set right before the break,” Somerville once noted as a new hand was being dealt, and when I looked up I saw Gross looking down at his phone while chatting with Colman about the hand.

Indeed, a half-hour before Gross had folded ace-queen following a 10-J-4 flop after Colman had bet (see the pic above), saying as he did he suspected Colman had pocket jacks. Now, watching the stream (see at left), Gross was discovering Colman indeed had a set, though with pocket tens.

I got to thinking about how it is a bit of work for the players to catch those moments on the stream, and of course if they’re involved in a new hand that distracts them further from following the action from a half-hour before. Also, it was clear that while most of the players at the table were checking their phones, not everyone was, and so that added another variable when it came to the information-gathering.

Would probably be best just to have the stream running on a screen near the table, much like the tournament clock. Not saying it’s a must (nor wanting to reengage the same old arguments about fairness and televised/streamed poker), although perhaps for final tables -- like, say, at the WSOP Main Event -- it should be considered.

Some tournament should try it, at least, just as an experiment. I’m sure it would get some attention, anyway. Or at least whatever attention most of us had left to give it while we were doing other things.

Images: twitch.tv/jcarverpoker.

Poker Talk: Playing the Twitch Card

On Monday a new item appeared in The New Yorker highlighting the growing popularity of Twitch streams by online poker players, in particular focusing on Jason Somerville’s remarkably rapid ascent to become the one of the site’s top stars.

The article -- “Can Live Streaming Save the Poker Industry?” by Cameron Tung -- does a good job contextualizing Somerville’s Twitch tale within the larger narrative of online poker’s quick rise in popularity during the mid-2000s and even more sudden drop-off post-Black Friday (especially here in the United States). Somerville’s own poker career of course directly reflects that surrounding story.

Like a lot of us, Somerville first got into poker in a big way post-Moneymaker, and like a decent percentage of that group made a career out of playing online that also came to include frequent excursions to play live events. And like a relatively small percentage of that group, he enjoyed significant success both online and live, earning him some renown within the community surrounding the game.

Black Friday then forced Somerville and all other U.S.-based online poker players to reevaluate their relationship to the game, and as we know Somerville eventually found a very creative -- and ultimately profitable -- option to pursue with his YouTube vids and eventual move onto Twitch.

It’s a short, easy read and as I say presents both Somerville’s story and the overall situation vis-à-vis poker in the United States ca. 2003 to the present fairly well. The only thing I really wonder about it is the question posed by the headline (which as we know sometimes isn’t the writer’s responsibility).

Tung points out -- drawing on PokerScout as a source -- that as far as online poker is concerned, “the global market has fallen off by more than half” since Black Friday. He thereby sets up a conclusion speculating about the “market” of online poker going forward and what impact Twitch (and, importantly, legislation) might have upon future growth.

I guess the headline makes it sound like online poker (or even poker in general) has reached a kind of crisis point and is in need of “saving,” which doesn’t quite seem to describe the current situation accurately. While hardly thriving as it did before (when the number of players was doubling every year, as the article points out), the “poker industry” doesn’t seem in danger of failing altogether just yet. Nor does that seem something likely to happen anytime soon, either. (I speak largely from the sidelines, from a country not presently part of the “market” upon which we’re focusing.)

Anyhow, the article -- the second poker-related piece within a couple of months in The New Yorker (with a poem about poker appearing within that stretch, too) -- is worth a look and as I say presents poker in a knowledgeable and even favorable way via Somerville’s story.

Watching the High Rollers

Have to admit my eagerness to follow what has been going on at the World Series of Poker has been coming and going here over the last week or so. Kind of surprising to look up and realize the Main Event is almost here (it starts Sunday).

In fact, I’ve found my attention as a poker-spectator divided this week somewhat by what’s happening over at the ARIA Resort & Casino, in particular by that big three-day “Super High Roller” cash game featuring $400/$800 blinds, $200 antes, and a quarter-million minimum buy-in. That’s leading up to a $500,000 buy-in “Super High Roller Bowl” tourney at the ARIA that starts tomorrow.

All of the action at the ARIA is being delivered over the PokerCentral Twitch channel, albeit without hole cards. It’s all being shot as well for broadcast later on NBCSN. The cash game has at times resembled the old High Stakes Poker shows given the emphasis on table talk and having lots of well known personalities sitting around the table. And I think I heard something about Gabe Kaplan and A.J. Benza coming back to do the commentary, although I’m not 100% on that.

Among those taking part thus far have been Jean-Robert Bellande, Bob Bright, Doyle Brunson, Daniel Colman, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Ivey, Matthew Kirk, Paul Newey, Doug Polk, Andrew Robl, David “Doc” Sands, Scott Seiver, Jennifer Tilly, and Sam Trickett.

There have been some huge pots and interesting props -- if you’re curious you can read PokerNews’ recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 and/or look through the live reporting blog.

You might’ve heard about one hand from yesterday involving Daniel Colman and Doug Polk in which the flop came -- that’s right, a second queen of clubs snuck in there. The craziest part of the hand, though, was the fact that neither Colman, Polk, nor anyone else at the table seemed to notice the duplicated card, and in fact the hand played to a conclusion before the fouled deck was realized. Take a look:

Seiver had a funny line soon after when Robl holding ace-queen called a preflop all-in by Polk who had a pair of kings. “Obviously Andrew’s playing this because there’s a bonus queen in the deck,” Seiver cracked.

The did fall on the flop in that one the first time they ran it, and Seiver said “I’m rooting for another queen of spades.” The then came on the turn to put Robl ahead, but a king came on the river to give Polk kings full. (Polk won the second run, too.)

Going back to hand with the duplicated card, though -- everyone’s so unfazed, despite the huge amount of money on the line. Safe to say if something similar happened at the Rio -- say, at a WSOP final table -- the response would hardly be so ho-hum.

The Virtual Rail

Late last week I was railing a friend as he played a Spring Championship of Online Poker event on PokerStars.

He was on Twitch as well, and once I realized that I opened up his channel and heard him commenting about the heads-up match in which he was involved to a modest-sized audience of viewers, some of whom were chatting to him along the way.

Eventually someone in chat mentioned how his opponent in the heads-up match was also streaming the match on Twitch, something my friend found interesting but didn’t really give much attention. His viewers continued to discuss it, though, and eventually someone mentioned the fellow’s Twitch handle.

Soon enough I had his channel up as well, meaning I had the Stars client open and showing the match play out plus both players’ Twitch channels on which they were commenting about the hands as they went by (about five minutes behind for each, I think).

This wasn’t a couple of pros playing at the highest levels and breaking down every decision to the smallest possible minutiae, so it wasn’t quite what you might be used to hearing as far as live analysis goes. My friend was commenting on hands in a relatively low-key manner, occasionally speculating about his opponent’s thinking or intentions as a hand progressed. Occasional chat box criticisms from the other fellow also got my friend’s attention, leading him to wonder if perhaps the guy might be tilted.

The other fellow’s channel absolutely confirmed that he was indeed much more emotionally involved in the match, hurling frequent epithets at my buddy whom he’d judged some time before to be a less than skilled player. While he’d kept the chat box comments to a minimum, he was showing no restraint before his Twitch followers, and it was almost as good a show as any Hellmuthian “How does he always get there!?!” rants.

The contrast between the two players’ personalities couldn’t have been greater. The match concluded almost predictably with my friend winning -- sucking out on the last hand, actually, after getting it in a slight dog -- and noting in an understated way his good fortune to advance. Meanwhile the other fellow was angrily throwing headphones around and shouting “I’m done! I’m done!” before logging off.

It all added up to something a little out-of-the-ordinary as far as watching poker was concerned, although maybe down the road something like that won’t seem so novel. Was entertaining to be sure, and perhaps a little bit educational, although in truth it felt more voyeuristic than anything, as a lot of what falls under the heading of “social media” ultimately is -- i.e., us looking at what other people are doing.

Players Sponsoring Themselves on Twitch

Was reading about Twitch this week. Hadn’t realized it had begun as a spinoff from the old Justin.tv, which I recall having tuned into occasionally in the past, including during those early marathon-streaming days of the old Quadjacks who I believe moved there at some point not long after Black Friday.

Justin.tv began back in 2007, then in 2011 created Twitch as a kind of separate network just for video gaming and “e-sports” competitions. The latter grew in popularity, then last summer Justin.tv was shut down so the parent company (Twitch Interactive) could focus just on Twitch.

Back in February PokerNews did an article suggesting 10 poker-related Twitch accounts to follow. Last month Eric Raskin wrote an interesting piece for All In looking at Twitch from a more theoretical point of view and relating it to other forms of “life streaming” whereby people turn their lives into shows for others to watch. (Twitter functions like that for some, I think, as I was writing about yesterday.)

BLUFF just ran a long profile of Scott Ball, a.k.a. “The Man Behind Twitch’s Poker Explosion,” which includes an overview of the site’s brief history and increasing involvement with poker.

Even The Wall Street Journal has written about Twitch becoming a destination for online poker players and those who enjoy watching others play (and/or learning about poker, too). The WSJ article cited a statistic that “In January, Twitch streamed 56 million minutes of poker, less than 1% of the total 16 billion minutes of streamed video on the site.” There were only 44,640 minutes in January, so I suppose that means an average of about 1,250 poker-related streams were live every minute of every day that month -- more than I’d have guessed.

Those who are able to get 500 or more viewers to watch their streams consistently are eligible to have a subscriber button put on their channels, which in turn becomes a way for viewers to subscribe for $4.99 a month (half of which goes to Twitch). Subscribers can then be offered extras such as special programming, access to archives, and so on.

Those who have Twitch channels can also derive income by selling advertising (with the revenue also shared 50/50 with Twitch). Twitchers can additionally get sponsorships or collect donations as a way to “monetize” what they’re doing, and in the case of poker players who are also coaches, they can use their Twitch channels to direct folks to purchase other content, hire them as coaches, and so on.

It struck me that with the paucity of online poker sponsorships post-Black Friday, Twitch has become a form of “self-sponsorship” for a not insignificant number of players, kind of analogous to self-publishing or other kinds of independently-produced content (e.g., music, video/film).

For me it remains a kind of idle, only occasionally-sought-after entertainment, although I continue to be impressed with how some -- with Jason Somerville the pioneer and current Twitch “chip leader” (by far) -- have found ways to make it work both for them and their viewers/followers/subscribers. And I continue to be curious about what will come of it, too.

Joining Team Moneymaker

Had great fun last night playing a poker tournament. Feel like I haven’t been able to say that much lately.

If you happen to follow Chris Moneymaker on Twitter, you might have seen him yesterday inviting people to join his new PokerStars Home Game. He has a new website -- Team Moneymaker -- which is part of a few new projects he’s developing, among them the PS Home Game. And the good news for those of us in the U.S. who aren’t able to play real money games, his Home Game is for play chips.

I signed up during the afternoon and then participated in the first of a few tournaments Moneymaker scheduled during the evening. Eventually he got his Twitch channel up and running as well, and provided commentary and feedback as we played.

I have to say I got a big kick out of Moneymaker’s stream, especially one time when I mistyped an opening raise with pocket jacks from UTG -- making it nearly 5x the big blind when I had been aiming for just under 3x -- and a couple of minutes later Moneymaker was commenting and making a note on me about my oversized open.

There were only 17 in this first tournament (including “Money800”). I stumbled early on, with none of my steal attempts or c-bets seeming to accomplish anything other than my dribbling away chips. But then I managed to pick up some decent hands and get paid for them, and eventually made it all of the way to having a chip lead with three players left.

Ran into some hard luck at that point -- if I were tweeting my progress, my followers would’ve gotten an “Out. QQ < AQ, then AJ < A8” note like those we’re all always seeing in our timelines -- and went out in third. The buy-in was exactly 1 play chip, my prize for finishing third was exactly 3, but the entertainment derived from those two hours was considerable.

So was the instruction, as I found myself genuinely challenged by certain decisions along the way and appreciating Moneymaker’s advice to players as he talked about bet-sizing and other decisions made by others (and himself) on Twitch.

I believe his plan will be to host Home Games each Monday night at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple of hundred at least taking part -- maybe more -- by the time word gets around and some momentum is built up. If you’re curious, you can join Team Moneymaker here, then join his Home Game using the Club ID 1954662 and Invitation Code TeamMoneymaker2015.

GPM Afterthoughts

On Friday I was noting how that Global Poker Masters event was coming up over the weekend, and indeed I ended up having the show -- streamed via Twitch -- up and running for most of Saturday and Sunday while my attention was divided somewhat by the NCAA basketball tournament.

Both events took up the majority of waking hours on both days, although the basketball featured multiple contests starting and ending (with clear winners and losers) while the team-style poker tournament was a lengthy, multi-stage competition that eventually whittled down to just two teams with Italy defeating Russia in the end.

I gave kind of a hasty summary of the GPM format here on Friday, although by the time things got going Saturday they might have tinkered further with it a bit, or at least that’s what commentators Joe Stapleton and Jesse May indicated at one point when talking about the players having made suggestions at the drawing party in Malta Friday night.

In any case, while Saturday’s sit-n-gos were easy enough to follow, I’ll admit I got a little lost on Sunday with what was happening, no doubt due in part to that aforemention division of my attention between the cards and hoops. Checking in over at PokerNews’ live reporting helped a lot, actually, when it came to sorting out how the teams were doing relative to one another as well as how the entire event was progressing toward its conclusion.

I did notice a couple of very interesting hands along the way. For example early on Saturday there was a hand that saw Dario Sammartino open with a raise with two red aces and Igor Yaroshevsky call from position with A-K. The flop then brought the case ace and what appeared the set-up for an inescapable knockout of Yaroshevsky, but the Ukrainian managed only to call a flop bet, check behind on the turn, then fold quickly to a decent-sized river bet by Sammartino.

In any tournament or session, a single hand is only a small part of the larger narrative of conflict involving many combatants. However, in this case the significance of this one hand was obscured even further by the complicated format. In other words, while in a regular tournament it would be easy enough to see how the hand might have affected the subsequent fortunes of the two players involved, here it didn’t seem all that meaningful occurring amid the early levels of one of 25 eight-player sit-n-gos played as the initial stage of a two-day, multi-stage event.

I guess what I’m saying by this observation is that while there were obviously some highly-skilled players participating and there were occasions as well for that skill to be displayed, I’m not so sure the format necessarily provided a consistent test of skill, nor too much chance to demonstrate that skill in ways that viewers could readily appreciate. (The fact that on Saturday the “hard stop” rule for the SNGs ended up encouraging a lot of gambly all-ins to conclude each of them didn’t help, either.) Contrast, if you like, those NCAA tournament games where individuals’ contributions to team goals were unambiguous, as were the results of those efforts during and at the conclusion of each contest.

There’s a lot else to say about both the event and its presentation to an audience, to which this is really just a very specific response alluding to just one small part of it. I thought it was interesting to hear GPI’s Alex Dreyfus on the stream discussing how one purpose for the Global Poker Masters event was to create a poker event that could attract non-poker coverage, thereby bringing poker to a wider audience. I’ll let others decide how well that goal was realized over the weekend.

Meanwhile, the first GPM did give us a number of things to think about, among them the idea of “team poker,” the efficacy of Twitch and other media for covering poker events, to what extent poker can hope to attract audiences (and new players) not already involved in the game, and what exactly is meant by attempts to “sportify” the game and/or its presentation.

Twitch Talk

Have you looked at Twitch, that live streaming video platform that has been gaining some notice in the poker world over the last several months?

I’m trying to remember when I first heard of Twitch. I think it was last year at some point when I heard Marcel Luske talking about the site and playing on it occasionally as marcelluske, although I never looked in.

Twitch launched in 2011, and quickly became very popular among the multiplayer online gaming crowd. It took poker players a little while to find the site and start using it, with Luske and Jason Somerville among the first to gravitate to it. I did watch some of Somerville’s “Run It Up” sessions -- played under his jcarverpoker account -- which were both interesting and entertaining.

It was easy to see while watching Somerville how the medium would work well for poker coaching -- much like instructional videos, only live and even interactive (via chat). You can watch him for free, although it looks like those who subscribe for a few bucks per month get access to special sessions, too.

I learned a bit more about Twitch at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure where Somerville, James McManus, Lee Jones, and Barry Greenstein presented a panel about poker’s past, present, and future. It was there Somerville suggested how Twitch could well attract a lot of newcomers to poker, and how in his experience many of those tuning in to watch him weren’t already deep into the game (as one might expect).

I’ve looked at a few other Twitch streams over the last few weeks.

I watched David Sklansky playing tourneys on WSOP.com on a couple of occasions on the twoplustwo_poker account, his cockatoo perched on his shoulder and cats climbing all over him as he did. He offered lots of justifications for his nittiness while responding to comments and some often funny questions in chat.

I also looked in on Casey Jarzebek’s “Monday Night MTT Grind with Beers!” a couple of nights ago over on his bigdogpckt55 Twitch, watching him play several hands well and make good reads in a tournament, although by the time I looked in I think he’d imbibed enough for his self-commentary to be reduced to repeating how easy poker was for him while touting his training site. Still entertaining, tho’.

I’m imagining some real interesting applications of Twitch, including for covering both live and online tournaments. The GPI guys are already planning to use it in some fashion, apparently, for that Global Poker Masters event next month. The delay for these I’ve been watching is just three minutes, I think, which tightens the window even further from the usual half-hour or thereabouts usually observed for “almost live” streams, which I think might present issues if hole cards are shown.

I haven’t read any cultural critics discussing Twitch as yet, although I assume it is being viewed as a logical next step in social media, making it even more simple than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. for everyone to broadcast his or her own life as a performance, packaging and presenting themselves in ways that satisfy various predilections (including the desire to “monetize” one’s existence, if possible).

I’ll ask again... have you looked at Twitch? What do you think of its potential relevance to poker?