| |
The World Series of Poker Attracts all Kinds
Published: 2005-04-13
 The World Series of Poker Attracts all Kinds
First there was Moneymaker, a guy who everyone thought made up his name, then came Fossilman, who used a real fossils to protect his hand and even sold the things on the side.
Now comes The Pink Bunny...what, yes, we said The Pink Bunny. As unbelievable as it seems, a young man named Jeremy Enke will being wearing a Pink Bunny suit at the tables of the 2005 WSOP. Like that wasn’t out there enough, this young entrepreneur agreed to wear the suit everywhere he goes while at the WSOP.
The first thought that came to our mind when we read about this was, pity the poor drunk, who sitting at the bar getting gracefully stoned, looks up only to see a Pink Bunny walking through the lobby of the casino. It will either be time to order a double or to give the sauce up for the rest of his life.
Enke has done amazing things in his short business career. He has been known for a long time as one of the top affiliates of Party Poker, authoring a best selling book along the way that explains his marketing techniques. He has started several successful web sites which include, Pokercareers.com and Partyriches.com. In his spare time he administers one of the premier affiliate forums on the web Partyriches.com/forums.
This, however, has got to be his greatest marketing stunt ever. Capitalizing on the ever increasing fascination with body advertising, Enke originally had the concept on Ebay for a couple of weeks. There was enormous interest but the minimum bid amount was a bit to rich. Never one to give up, Enke put the bunny back up, but this time with no reserve. This guaranteed he would be wearing the Pink Bunny suit no matter what the bid. The bidding seemed all but over when it reached the $7600.00 mark. Enke even commented on his own forum that it surprised him it had gotten that high.
The real surprise was yet to come. In the closing minutes of the auction, the now famous Ebay bidder, GoldenPalaceCasino.com, snuck in and posted the final bid. They will pay Enke $15,100.00 to dawn his suit.
If the planets align just right we could have a final table that included a “Moneymaker” (Chris Moneymaker), a “Fossilman” (Greg Raymer), a man called “Jesus” (Chris Ferguson), a “Professor” (Howard Lederer), a “Devil Fish” (Dave Ulliot), a “Master” (Men Nguyen), a “Great Dane” (Gus Hansen), a “Poker Brat” (Phil Hellmuth) and without a doubt the strangest of all, a “Pink Bunny” (Jeremy Enke).
And like Enke says; “There's a million ways to make a million dollars in this world, you only need to find one”.
| |
Whiz-kids gamble on TV channel for poker
Published: 2005-04-16
 Whiz-kids gamble on TV channel for poker
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 16/04/2005)
As a theatre of cruelty, it is held by many to be the latest thing in cool. But can poker, possibly less exciting to watch than even synchronised swimming, really become a spectator sport?
A small team of City whiz-kids and London media figures - one, improbably, is an Oxford classicist - have put their shirts on it. This week they launched the world's first television channel dedicated to poker.
Like watching paint dry to the uninitiated: poker players on TV
Darts, snooker and even gardening have become proven television successes in the past decade but not even they have been given a channel to themselves.
The Poker Channel, launched on Sky Digital, dares to be different because of the jaw-dropping sums of money now swirling around on-line poker betting.
Britain accounts for 20 per cent of the £50 million staked on poker sites around the world each day.
There are five million players in this country and Party Gaming, the Gibraltar-based company that runs Partypoker.com, which boasts 70,000 players online at any one time, is set to catapult into the FTSE 100 valued at £3 billion if it sticks to plans to float on the London Stock Exchange later this year.
Crispin Nieboer, the founder of the Poker Channel, says: "Time and again people launch channels that will never make money.
"In the entertainment sector only about 10 or 20 per cent of the channels on Sky are profitable. But I believe that this is the best sub-£5 million channel that I have ever looked at."
Mr Nieboer, 31, may have good grounds for his confidence. Formerly the head of media and telecoms at N M Rothschild, he was then in charge of channel development and launches at Sky before this adventure.
But will games of poker actually be watchable to any but aficionados? A recording of a heat this week for the new British Poker Open was, to non-playing outsiders, like watching paint dry. Six players at a kidney-shaped table at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith occasionally muttered, pondered long and hard and once in a while gave an opponent a long, cold glare before, usually, folding before their bluff was called.
However, to Mr Nieboer this was as tense and dramatic as Shakespeare. The commentator, Jesse May, was almost in a state of meltdown speculating as to whether Jac "The Attack" Arami would fold or play on in a hand of Texas Hold 'Em. Arami did play on. "While this guy has chips he can to-orture the others," roared May.
And, in the packed control room, the experts chatted excitedly about statistics and camera angles while swapping tales about poker greats with terrific names such as Devilfish, The Lizard, Barney Boatman and the scary-sounding Hendon Mob.
"There really is an inherent drama in poker," insists Mr Nieboer.
"It is a game of bluff and here is fantastic human emotion and tension, seeing who can bluff the longest."
Poker is not new to television. Individual tournaments have been shown on Channels 4 and 5 and Sky for several years, usually late at night.
Mr Nieboer says he has no fears about filling a channel 24 hours a day, seven days a week with just one subject.
His flagships will be live coverage of newly-created tournaments, such as the British Open (top prize £216,000) which runs until May 9, and celebrity tournaments.
There is no shortage of famous players to invite: the roll-call includes Brad Pitt, Johnny Vegas, Nigella Lawson, Stephen Fry and Robbie Williams.
There will, he admits, be plenty of repeats and bought-in old tournaments. But he says he is aiming for "high value" programmes to educate the uninitiated - interviews, strategy instruction and the like.
For live coverage, there is gimmickry galore: all tournament players wear heart monitors so that their heart rates can be flashed on screen when they are under pressure.
Under-table cameras allow viewers to see all cards, contestants march to the table to the strains of gladiatorial music and statistics are ceaselessly flashed on screen to show the winning chances of card combinations.
"Some of the poker programmes we have seen before were fairly low budget whereas we think that poker should be given treatment as good as other sports," said Mr Nieboer.
Improbably, the channel, with annual running costs budgeted at £1 million, will not offer interactive betting, at least, not directly.
Instead, it will share income with on-line betting companies that sponsor televised tournaments. The poker boom has been compared to the dotcom boom, but The Poker Channel's chairman and principal investor, Justin Byam Shaw, an Oxford classics graduate and media venture capitalist, does not believe interest in the card game will wane quickly. He said: "Of course the comparison makes me nervous but the coda to that is that there are many very successful large businesses that came through the crash." And Mr Nieboer says the boom has barely started. "I would expect to see four or five copycat poker channels in the next 18 months.
"In fact, I know three of them already."
| | |
English
Deutsch
Español
Français
Italiano
Nederlands
Pусский
Svenska