No Cards, No Cash: The Crazy Plan to Make Poker an eSport
Image: Global Poker Index

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No Cards, No Cash: The Crazy Plan to Make Poker an eSport

The Global Poker League has some radical ideas for making poker more exciting.

Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Global Poker Index (GPI), has been going to live eSports tournaments around the world to learn why games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike succeeded where poker has failed.

Poker is older, easier to understand, and, with televised tournaments on ESPN since 1988, more generally accepted as a sport than any video game, but it doesn't pull in the same rabid fanbase. According to research firm Repucom, there are 100 million poker fans in the world and 51 million in the US—they're just not watching poker like League of Legends fans watch League of Legends tournaments.

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"We failed to invest in characters and creating a format that fits the audience and not just the players," Dreyfus told me. "It has strong characters, everyone knows about it, but we failed to create something fun."

Dreyfus' solution is the Global Poker League (GPL), which wants to "sportify" poker, making it a spectator game rather than a game anyone can play for money. In fact, taking real money wagering out of the game is key to the whole endeavor. It makes the game legal everywhere, hopefully less controversial, and puts more emphasis on skill.

In the GPL, which will begin in the first quarter of 2016, 12 privately-owned teams of poker players representing 12 cities will compete for the crown and unspecified prizes, but the chips don't represent money, just the points you need to win.

In the format Dreyfus describes, matches take place inside of a 20-by-20-by-20-foot glass, sound-proof cube, in front of thousands of spectators. Players have to stand up, which Dreyfus hopes makes them more emotive, and which frees up their backs for sponsorship space. With the aim of keeping matches as short as 30-40 minutes, physical cards are replaced with a digital system, which deals hands four times faster.

"I want to see six guys versus six guys raging against each other," Dreyfus said.

Also in the interest of time, players have a total of 50 minutes per match to make their decisions, kind of like the clocks in chess tournaments. Physical poker chips are still in the game because the drama of pushing stacks across the table is too good to give up, but the chips have RFID chips in them so that information is fed into the digital system as well.

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GPI already ran an event testing some of these strategies earlier this month (no giant cube, sadly) with the Global Poker Masters 2015 tournament in Malta. The event was livestreamed on Twitch, where it racked up 1.2 million viewers over two days, though Dreyfus admits that's because Twitch promoted the event as part of partnership with GPI. There's also already a growing number of known poker players livestreaming on Twitch, and while GPI has yet to announce where you'll be able to watch GPL events, Twitch seems like the likeliest candidate.

Ten years ago, the GPL would have sounded crazy, but less so given the rise of eSports, which research firm Newzoo estimates will hit revenues totalling $765 million in 2018. How crazy is it to imagine poker as a spectator sport if hundreds of thousands of people are already tuning into professional Hearthstone matches, a card game made by World of Warcraft-developer Blizzard.

At this point, the biggest difference is that poker carries with it the stigma of gambling. In Las Vegas, poker tables share the same space with roulette tables, so people associate it with seedy games of luck rather than games of skill.

"I don't just think poker is a game of skill, we have figures to show it," Dreyfus said. "The GPI ranks 450,000 poker players in 97 countries. The top 20 players, they're always the same guys."

As a very casual poker player, decoupling chips from money seems like a bad idea. I thought the whole reason the game was exciting is that real money was moving around the player, but Dreyfus disagrees.

"Remember, Zynga Poker [the Facebook game] used to have 3 to 5 million players every day, and they never played for money," he said. "Let's get those casual fans, and we'll monetize it like eSports, with ticketing, advertising, and merchandise."