Twitch And The New Poker Revolution

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Wednesday, June 10th, 2015 | Written by Stephen Smith

It’s no secret Twitch is one of the most important streaming services for gaming, be it mobile, desktop or console, and each months attracts a huge 100 million viewers. Popular poker players have now started to play games or create tutorials and stream them on Twitch, too, something that has helped them tap into Twitch’s huge potential audience base. Jason Sommerville’s jcarver channel, for instance has attracted 6,089,466 visits and 93,016 followers as of today, while an incredible 150,000 people tuned in to watch 6-times WSOP bracelet winner Daniel Negreanu compete with play money on a PokerStars game. So what’s behind this sudden surge in popularity?

Educational

A huge percentage of the poker viewing audience has tired of just watching tournaments on the TV, and instead now prefer a more personal way to interact with poker content. Through its unique set of features, Twitch manages not only to be a stellar streaming platform, but also an educational one as well, because people can learn new poker tricks and strategies. The educational factor of just being able to learn how to improve your game is more than enough for the audience to stick to the stream, sometimes even for hours, and the games are indeed quite fun to say the least.

Fun, Interactive Environment

Poker players such as Jason Somerville or Daniel Negreanu have managed to accumulated millions of views on their channels and when they are online can rack up thousands of views, something that many gaming channels on Twitch can only dream of. But a major appeal for the audience is definitely the single idea of being able to actually listen and even talk or ask the professional poker player a question. This is one of the only methods people can interact with the poker pros, and since poker has a massive number of players online, many of which aren’t that successful, there are always those that want to get much better results and watching such streams just allows them that possibility.

Attract New Audience

In August 2014, eCommerce giant Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million and in November hired Scott Ball to oversee Twitch’s $1 billion expansion project into the world of online poker. Ball was recently honored with a GPI Poker Innovation of the Year award at the American Poker Awards for his contribution to the industry, and talking to the Wall Street Journal said that Twitch excels at drawing “more young, male users, a demographic coveted by advertisers.” Elaborating further, Ball explained:

“I think that’s one of the big things that poker has the opportunity to do on Twitch is bring a lot of new players to the games. If you think about it, the esports base of people are people that, a lot of the times, already spend money entering tournaments for video games on a regular basis.”

Good For Poker

Is this a good thing for poker? Of course it is, because not only does it connects the pros with their audience, but it gives them the ability to gain poker knowledge for free, directly from experts, which is too amazing an opportunity to pass up. At the same time, the shows on their own are really fun to begin with, so it’s just like watching a TV show about poker that lasts hours. With numerous benefits, Twitch streaming is quickly becoming one of the best ways to learn poker, and we can clearly see this becoming a habit.

Twitch poker streaming also manages to increase the exposure of poker in the online world, and this is definitely a good thing. Of course, the Twitch platform is still mostly dedicated for gaming, but it’s nice to see that other genres such as poker streaming are rising, and as PR Director of Twitch, Chase, explains:

“Something I think the poker industry can learn from the gaming industry is we [Twitch] represent the whole ecosystem of video games from the publishers and developers to the all the events and all the tournaments and leagues and so forth. There’s definitely opportunities for media. Every top video game media site has a Twitch channel. I think you’ll see a lot of poker events on the platform, a lot of tournaments.”

How much will Twitch poker evolve is really hard to say, but one thing is certain, with more and more pros creating their own channels, things are definitely getting better and better.