Shells
Judging from venues in Las Vegas and other major cities dedicating arenas for Egaming tournaments, etc. I'm guessing Egaming is not phasing out just yet.
Good point- and one which I believe should apply to poker also. The signs are all there that when poker is staged properly there is a great response. The fields have been strong or growing at live events around the world (from the
wsop to the EPT).
Obviously Poker Stars seems to have been self-immolating starting from the Super Nova Elite debacle and have just added fuel to the fire along the way. Whether it was with the pettiness of increasing the buy ins of play money through to tampering with the EPT -still diminishing the tour and now not even bothering to cover all events live in the manner they used to.
That said there have been some moves made which I believe have slowed pokers potential popularity in recent years and one would be the influence of
PokerGo.
PokerGo is both a positive and a negative to the poker community. Content has expanded, but lets face it some is good and some mediocre- I don't feel driven to watch the likes of Randall Emmet on Poker After Dark for example. But the biggest mistake has been allowing such an entity to ringfence content. I have no issue with PokerGo producing and therefore charging a subscription for its own content.
What I objected to was the WSOP getting into bed with PokerGO and then allowing them to control distribution of the World Series coverage. In my opinion a completely short sighted view to take short term profit.
Prior to this the WSOP was free to view for the entire world and tens of thousands (hundreds?) followed the WSOP via You Tube throughout the duration. Not only did this casual/seasonal audience get blocked, but then
all prior WSOP content which had existed for years
free to the public was also removed and only available via a PokerGO subscription.
This was such a dubious move by the WSOP and PokerGo. Removing content which has been free to view for years? That WSOP coverage year in and out kept a global interest bubbling. Poker is not the English Premier League where the sport is so huge you can force people to watch via subscription. Poker needs to grow and it needs to promote itself via free to view content- most sports and activities understand providing such content is integral to growth. Poker in this instance (unsurprisingly) decided leaching from a small insular group of players and enthusiasts through subscriptions was a 'better' course to take.
Its odd, while many poker players often wistfully speak of their skills translating into other fields of life (investment and business) few seem inclined to have spoken up on this issue. As far as I am aware, Doug Polk is the only key figure to (mildly) state that ring fencing
key poker content via subscription was not going to be the best way to generate a wider audience.
I am lucky enough to have recorded various global poker events for years- all free to watch- for my own study/amusement. But it still bugs me when I would like to watch any given yesteryear of the WSOP I find they have all been removed from You Tube and placed behind a paywall. How did/does anyone think this is growing the game, reaching out to the public?
Poker from one perspective is more popular today than it has been for a long time, yet it could have been reaching a much wider audience than it has for the past several years.
What do they do all day? Are these all Software Programmers? I can't even imagine why they would need that many employees to begin with?? Do they have a customer service or online chat help crew of 200+? Just who are these people and what are their daily job functions???
