Poker's desperately needed culture change to bring it into the main stream = (spoiler) Sponsors

The quick answer is "no".

People who have been around a little longer even remember a time where poker was on the way to becoming mainstream. The "boom" years that even saw corporate sponsors like Milwaukee's Best.

Annie Duke is very good at business, maybe you should reach out to here about something like this.

def need the Milwaukee's Best hole card cam back

Like the Global Poker League than ran for 2 seasons in 2015 ?

I think poker without money is just not cool enough or even appealing enough for that, it’s just a card game, similar to magic the gathering or pokemon tcg

Are there any endeavors with a large luck factor that generate enough interest to attract large sponsorship money? One of the factors that increased interest during the boom was the inclusion of celebrities (whose fame was achieved in other fields). There wasn't a lot of high-level competition.

Competitive golf does have entry fees, but maybe not at the top level (and might be paid by the sponsors, if so). The Korn Ferry Tour (the PGA minor league, sort of) has entry fees.

In a small field competition, you'd want the best players competing to attract interest. Do to the large luck factor, it's hard to know who they are.

One of the reasons poker enjoyed some success was that there are so many people who played the game who were also the audience for televised games. But that's a viewing pool of limited size with not much growth potential. What growth potential it had was stifled by the government.

Poker played at it's highest level is quite boring to watch. The games that are watchable are controlled to include "live ones" and "big names" and VPIP minimums of some sort. It's somewhat of a contrived game.

Poker played without money becomes an exercise in math. Few want to watch that.

They might have been able to put something like this together in 2004 or 2005 when poker was red hot, but they missed their window.

It has always been customary for poker players to front their entry fees and pay rake, so convincing venues to not only turn down that money, but to actually front money themselves to be featured on the broadcast would be hard work. Mainstream non-gambling brands (Rolex, BMW) would likely shy away from poker because of the negative gambling/degeneracy connotations. Golf is considered a rich person's game, which fits the brand image of Rolex, BMW, etc.

Poker is considered a scummy backroom gambling game, so you lose a lot of the potential sponsors through fear of negative association. Even at the peak of WSOP on ESPN, the sponsors were lowbrow crap like Jack's Links and Milwaukee's Best. Not exactly Rolex and BMW.

You could try to make it all about the venues. The early seasons of the WPT were like advertisements for the properties featured like Bellagio and Foxwoods. It's reasonable to think that venues might kick out some prize money to be highlighted on shows like this, but again, it's a tough sell to convince them to pay out the whole prize pool when poker players are already willing to pay their own way.

What poker actually needs is legislation to allow brick and mortar poker clubs to crop up, similar to mahj and bridge.

Yes by all means TV considers poker 'a scummy backroom gambling game' says the folks who jam every MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL game with endless ads for DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM Bet. . .well, you get the idea.

I see what you are saying, but yes.

The connotations of golf are country clubs, rich people, beautiful scenery.

The connotations of poker are casinos, slot machines, cigarette smoke, degenerate gamblers.

You don't want your brand attached to that.

People may gamble on the NBA and NFL, but the sports themselves do not entail gambling.

If someone goes pro in basketball, their family will be proud.

If someone says, "I want to become a professional poker player," their family might hold an intervention.

People like Negreanu and Hellmuth may have helped drag poker's reputation from the gutter up to the toilets, but it's still not an innately reputable activity. Rightly or wrongly, it's lumped in with other casino endeavors like blackjack, craps, and slots. The layperson will make no distinction.

Watching high level poker is boring as hell for 99.9999 percent of people.

It's really that simple.

Can't gamble in a bridge club, so be careful what you wish for.

I always loved the Jack Link's Beef Jerky Mystery Hand

I often wonder if the misquote "if you build it, they will come" from the movie Field of Dreams – plus the closing credit scene of that film to show that people did indeed show up – got in the heads of many an aspiring entrepreneur.

OP, you're sort of putting the cart before the horse. Your rationale is that poker should have sponsored entries and prize pools and then it will be popular and mainstream. But realistically, the cause-effect flows the other way: poker has to become so popular and mainstream that sponsors will suddenly want to pick up the tab on the buy-ins and prize pool. And I don't realistically see that happening – especially for the amount of money involved to keep the top players interested.

That said, we've already had small versions of it: the SNG episodes on the original Poker After Dark come to mind. Full Tilt at least partially subsidized the buy-ins for their red pros (if my memory serves from something Gavin Smith said). Since the whole thing was effectively an ad for Tilt, it was worth it to them to sponsor the series.

Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown was a freeroll, with the prizes going to charities rather than the players. The prize pool itself was sponsored each year. Of course, this did not feature any top players, other than the sighting of Greg Raymer and Mike Matusow in the stands. But it's an example of televised poker, without the buy-in, seeking a mainstream audience. I can say it was responsible for bringing at least one fan to the game.

I seem to recall the WSOP Tournament of Champions being a freeroll. The overall prize pool came from the WSOP itself, and certain "sponsor exempt" players were invited to play. Either way, this would be the closest to a PGA Tour event: a select and limited field, mostly familiar names and faces (at least in the early days), with both buys-in and prizes covered by someone other than players. But the fact that they don't still do it suggests to me that it wasn't worth the hustle.

In golf, the top players have a history of ingrained thinking that their legacy matters; in poker, I don't know if anyone but Negreanu and Hellmuth feel this way.

Put another way - first place from this year's US open was $4.3M, but I bet if you asked any golfer in the world top 25 "you can have the US open, or you can have 10M right now" a majority would take the US open. Imagine saying something like that to your average elite poker player "You can have the WSOP main event this year, or 2x whatever first place is".

No one talks about Rory costing himself $2M with his choke job yesterday - all they talk about is him blowing the major. That kind of thinking is a long long way from arriving in the poker world.

Golf is 99% skill with a storied history and extensive pedigree. Poker is 30% luck with a sordid history and a single generation of pedigree

have we forgotten how much the PPT electrified the poker world

golf is also the best players in the world competing against each other. the wsop overall isn't that. and in the few events where it is, it's totally unwatchable for 99.9 percent of people who like poker. That makes it very different than sports. Who likes football but hates watching the Superbowl or likes baseball but hates watching the World Series? Nobody.

While I'm not a golf fan at all, people like watching the best athletes in the world compete. In modern poker watching the best players just isn't exciting. A big part of what drew people in to poker were the personalities, the gambling aspect of it and the anyone can win the main event aspect. That's all basically gone these days.

Poker will never have the prestige of an almost all skill event of the best athletes in world in that sport.

TV considers any show where advertisers are knocking at their doors to be a part of 'good TV'. We did have 'Skinemax' quite some time ago. Granted that's basically the dawn of a paywall, but I think a good portion of Americans had a fairly surly opinion about nudity 'on TV'.

I'd love to see how that graph was generated. Demographics and what not. My first thought is that people don't need to 'search' for poker because 'it's everywhere' already.

I'd also point out that tournament entries are basically at an all-time high going back into 2023.

My flip-side issue is that poker is not sustaining the injection of younger Players 'live'. The tournament boom I note above could be a false front simply because a very large portion of the population is getting older, with disposable income, that experienced the poker boom and is now investing their (now) free time into the events. There's a whole generation of 'parents' who absorbed their parents debt free estates, the whole life insurance funds that came with it along with their 2-income family set up (with 2-3 less kids per family) and perhaps some buy-outs, 401Ks and even some crypto/similar quick hitting investments that are now free to join or greatly increase their time spent on poker.

What do you consider the 'gambling' part of poker? The buying of chips or the losing of chips? The fact that there's a winner and losers? Remember poker is a zero sum game. Eliminate the money and you can reduce every session down to 'bragging rights', which in a sense makes every session sum to zero. Pretty much every driveway has a game of chance (competition) going on .. hoops, soccer, swimming or whatever. Very early on we play games for bragging rights.

Are you going to make bluffing illegal? When we bluff we are 'gambling' that the other Player wont call, eh?

I agree that as far as sponsorship I think that ship has passed. The funds that used to go into poker shows are now getting spread out into 24/7 coverage with the inclusion of sports betting into the mainstream. I don't think you'll see a LIV Golf like opportunity for poker. As others have said, 'good' live poker is boring even with hole cards and improved commentators. Like Baseball, there's no defined ending in poker. Even with the inclusion of a pitch clock a baseball game can drag on with foul balls, walks (and replays). That may be Poker's biggest issue .. while the highlights may be very exciting, the game in of itself is not. GL

At what point did any of the mainstream sponsors of WSOP etc add a cent to the prizepool?

The only shot we have at that is either via Freeroll or that increases in tournament rake were 'slowed' with the knowledge that sponsorship money was rolling in also.

Very little chance you'll find a standard poker tournament where a sponsor added to the prize pool. GL

In golf they'd probably make up most of that money with sponsorship deals anyway.

Whereas poker of course not.

Nobody is throwing away 5.7 million away for legacy reasons alone unless they are already filthy rich.