Home / Poker News October 2010 / Celebrities promoting poker – a trend for the future?
Celebrities promoting poker – a trend for the future?
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2010-10-31 09:21
Despite the often abusive legal setbacks that have hindered the growth of the game in recent years, online poker continues to draw ever more players and as its popularity continues to increase, poker rooms turn to ever newer and less orthodox methods of promotion. It has been accepted practice for quite a while now for poker rooms to pay renowned poker professionals to represent their brand at live events and to play online against the regular folks. The advantages of such setups are obvious both for the poker room and the poker professionals concerned: the professional is paid solid money for the services he provides, and the poker room uses the professional’s image to attract new players, and to generate action at the highest available stakes. Full Tilt Poker is the online poker room that first resorted to hiring professional players to play online. Nowadays, Full Tilt Poker is the home of the
best high stakes online poker cash games, where some of the world’s best professionals congregate. The draw of the high stakes action is such that anybody who’s looking to play for serious money goes to Full Tilt and deposits there these days.
One interesting phenomena that branched out of this “in house pro” business was the “Friend of Full Tilt Poker” setup. Under the umbrella of this new
Full Tilt Poker support initiative, tennis player James Blake has been the latest to join. Before that, the site had added hockey legend Wayne Gretzky too. What kind of weight do these celebrity endorsements carry though? Will these guys actually take a seat and play at Full Tilt Poker, because if that is indeed the case, a new wave of players is likely to flock in just to take them on.
Only the future will tell whether such celebrity endorsements add to the legitimacy of online poker operations, thus offering the supporters of legal online poker another argument in their ongoing battle to have the game legalized.
