thanks for the reply. I would guess that when you start becomin a success at the high stakes tables, you could honestly care less about wearing any logo.Short answer is mostly they don't.
In general though, the answer is the same as sponsorship in any other medium or field. To get sponsors interested in you, you have to have profile and pull with a large enough audience that a company thinks paying you to wear their logo or shill their product will result in a significant increase in revenue.
In the case of online poker that'd mean becoming very well known across a broad cross section of the poker community, which pretty much always means playing at the highest stakes or having some kind of crossover success in live televised poker.
Win the WSOP main event and you will get insta sponsored.
thanks for the reply. I would guess that when you start becomin a success at the high stakes tables, you could honestly care less about wearing any logo.
Not necessarily - if you make the final table you'll definitely be paid to wear patches while you're playing the final table (if you want to - Darvin Moon refused, for example),
LOL - colour me amazed on two counts then. One that a site actually thought they'd want Darvin Moon for an entire year (even if he had've won, he's basically unmarketable) and two, that that's the reason he said no
For a while there I know Stars was sponsoring some online only players who didn't play super high but who had a huge following anyway. Mostly huge volume guys or huge pro ongoing prop bets with amazing traffic to their blogs/twitter.
It's a speculative investment. If the guy wins (Darvin or whoever they get to wear their logo) they will be able to get great returns on that investment. No one who wins is unmarketable, though they might be limited. But they might as well go for a whole year - when you think of it a whole year contract would probably not cost them much more than just a "wear out patch as long as you're still in" contract.
If the guy tanks and goes out 8th (yeah, I'm looking at you Salaburu) well then at least they got some quality TV time of their logo/name being displayed. Although in this case I wonder if that was a good thing for someone like Tournament Poker Edge to associate themselves with the one guy who was described as a combination of the worst aspects of Mike Matusow and Phil Hellmuth. But like they say, any publicity is good publicity.
Oh I dunno... I'd argue that Darvin Moon was basically unmarketable.
If he had any appeal at all it was very narrow. He wasn't really likely to play many other large-buy in televised tournaments - let alone actually make the televised part of them, so there's not much bang to be had from putting a logo on him after his guaranteed TV time at the main event was up.
He wasn't billboard or advertising material, and he wasn't much of a talker. He was a nobody before he won the main event, so media interest in him would die about a week after the tournament finished. He was a self-confessed luckbox, easily the worst player at his final table, so it's not like they could sell him based on his poker knowledge.
Quite simply, I think money spent on him would have been money wasted.