New Pro Poker League

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/news/story?id=6032880

Saw this post yesterday on a new pro poker sports league. This league is being started by Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack. Pollack is the former commissioner of the WSOP and is currently chairman of the PBR and a former NASCAR and NBA executive. This is not the first time an attempt has been made to form a pro poker league. On the face of it, it sounds like a great idea that would be successful. However, Duke and company face a big challenge ahead of them. The biggest obstacle will be sponsorship from mainstream companies. To create the prize pools, they will need corporate sponsorship from other than poker related entities. So far this has proven impossible from well known and established companies. The WSOP has been successful in getting Milwaukee's best, Jack's Beef Jerky, and Planters Peanuts. This is fine and dandy but for a professional league to be successful you need more leading commercial companies like soft drink companies, leading beer companies, fast food chains or a cellular provider. This will prove difficult for them I fear as there is still a stigma associated with poker and gambling in general.

The second issue is who do you choose to play and what criteria do you create to allow for new entrants to gain admittance and for exempt players to keep their spots. There are so many top notch poker players from around the world that this will be hard to limit to 200. They will get all the old guard that are popular and have had significant TV exposure in the past. This will include people who have not done much in the last 3-5 years but because they were big at the poker boom in 2003-04 they will get invited. Duke states the league is for best players and that fans want to see TV pros. They are not the same thing. The best players today are not known to most casual fans.

The third issue will be tv coverage. For this to be successful they need a network to host it. ESPN may or may not since the calendar is full of more popular sports and they show a good amount of poker right now with the NAPT and the WSOP. Other cable channels will not expose this to the common man. The people who watch on Fox sports, GSN and Versus are hardcore poker junkies like myself, not your causal weekend sports watcher. ABC, FOX, NBC, or CBS need to be the destination. I suspect Fox or NBC may be ideal since they already show poker related content.

I wish them luck and hope they are successful but I feel it may be difficult to accomplish this and sustain it successfully.