Harrah's has said that they are
thinking about opening a UK/Europe focused online poker room.
Interesting...
Harrah's bought the rights to the World Series of Poker in 2004, and it is the poker's pinnacle event of the year. But attendance this year was hurt because many online poker sites weren't permitted to give out prize packages to U.S. residents awarding them seats in the main event that cost $10,000 each.
If they do go ahead with this, I just hope they do it properly. I haven't been very impressed with a lot of the decisions made by the WSOP and WPT recently.
The World Poker Tour has their own poker room. They have had one for a while actually, but it is not open to US residents, and originally debuted on what was perhaps the worst poker software in existence. They moved to the cryptologic platform recently, which is better but still not that great.
They also now geo-target their WorldPokerTour.com website and automatically divert all of it's non-US traffic to their online poker site - which really annoys me! I don't want to play at your crappy poker site WPT, I want to check out your live tournaments and everything else that the WPT actually does well. But unless I guess a direct URL to a tournaments page, I can't do that - which is a dumb decision. People don't like being forced to a destinaion they don't want to go to, and you will be losing poker fans that loved your website.
Another stupid thing that both the WPT and WSOP have done recently is sell exclusive media rights to their events. First Bluff Magazine bought the rights to the WSOP. Then CardPlayer bought the rights to the WPT. I love the guys at Bluff - they are good people - and it was a shrewd move on their part wrapping up the exclusivity.
But it was an idiotic decision by the WSOP and then the WPT to take a quick buck and lock other media agencies out of their events. One thing people that run poker tournaments do no do well at all is look after the media and the people that give their events free publicity both online and offline. They treat media and reporters as though they are second class citizens. You virtually have to get top secret governmental security clearance and submit to a cavity search to even get close to a poker tournament as a reporter these days.
Look at any other sport on the planet and you will see how well they take care of the media. They get the BEST seats, access to anything they need and are treated very well. Because the owners of the teams know that the more exposure and favourable reports they get, the more fans they will reach and the more money they will make. I used to work for a pro sports team on game nights, and my sole responsibility was playing host to the press and making sure they had everything needed, plenty of refreshments and answering any questions they had about the finer points of the game or the team's players. Why has poker lost the plot in this regard?
Even at Crown Casino for the Aussie Millions - which has an excellent reputation for being nice people and running things smoothly - after assuring press people before the event that they would be taken care of, it was impossible to even get a lousy internet connection or a space to put a pc. Taking photos or getting close to the tables was out of the question. They didn't care about the people there to report on their event and it is just foolish.
And what has happened to the freedom of the press to report to the public what is going on in their community? Our very democratic framework relies on the freedom of information, and the role of the press in reporting what is going on - it is an integral part of how countries are run. The government has to be accountable to the public, and the press relays the information the public needs to make informed decisions. And somewhere like the USA, the right to free speech might actually render any sort of exclusive reporting agreement useless anyway if challenged constitutionally.
Hopefully in the future we'll see these kinds of exclusive agreements abolished and the people who run poker events will recognise how reporting agencies should be treated, like the rest of the sport and entertainment industry learned a looooooonnnnnggg time ago. Look after the press you clowns! They'll pay you back in spades.
I'm wandering from the point here, but in the long run I just hope the WSOP makes some good decisions with their online poker room if they decide to go ahead with it. Hire some people that actually know what they are doing and don't try to set up a room yourself Harrahs.
And please choose some software that people actually like to play... Seeing as you will be wanting people to sit in front of their PC for hours playing tournaments, it's the most important decision you can make.
This post is pretty much just another plug for the Poker Players' Alliance. I haven't spoken about them for a while, but if you live in the USA and play poker, you should show your support for this group by signing up as a member at www.pokerplayersalliance.org.
