How Will Hiatus Affect WSOP Main Event Marketing, Viewership?
After 11 days of play in the WSOP Main Event, the starting field of 6,844 players has been whittled down to "nine guys you never heard of," and the tournament now "takes a break for 117 days before a two-day final table in November," according to Jeff Haney of the LAS VEGAS SUN. The "unprecedented interruption" was designed "primarily to generate hype and buzz around the final table." WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack has said that the "November Nine" finalists "would all become household names," but Haney wrote WSOP officials "will need all the help they can get" to publicize the players. The group "contains no widely recognized professional players, no poker-TV personalities, no immediate sentimental favorite." Yet Pollack still looks to be "well on his way to achieving another of his stated goals: having the finalists in the major World Series events outfitted like NASCAR drivers, with myriad sponsor patches on their clothes to take full advantage of poker's marketing opportunities." As the tournament played down from the final three tables Monday, "nearly all players were sporting the logos of various online poker rooms." Haney wrote, "Do viewers like televised poker because of the game's strategic nuances or because of the outsize personalities playing it? No one -- not popular tournament pros, not unknown players, not TV executives -- has been able to answer adequately." But the answer "probably lies somewhere in the middle." Haney: "Will the winner be heralded as a dynamic new force in poker? Or will he be viewed as a soon-to-be-forgotten curiosity piece, the latest lottery winner?" (LAS VEGAS SUN, 7/16).
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