Sponsors

What does it take to get sponsored? Obviously win and be successful in the game, but how do players get exposure if they only play online?

Short answer is mostly they don't.

In general though, the answer is the same as sponsorship in any other medium or field. To get sponsors interested in you, you have to have profile and pull with a large enough audience that a company thinks paying you to wear their logo or shill their product will result in a significant increase in revenue.

In the case of online poker that'd mean becoming very well known across a broad cross section of the poker community, which pretty much always means playing at the highest stakes or having some kind of crossover success in live televised poker.

OzExorcist said:

Short answer is mostly they don't.

In general though, the answer is the same as sponsorship in any other medium or field. To get sponsors interested in you, you have to have profile and pull with a large enough audience that a company thinks paying you to wear their logo or shill their product will result in a significant increase in revenue.

In the case of online poker that'd mean becoming very well known across a broad cross section of the poker community, which pretty much always means playing at the highest stakes or having some kind of crossover success in live televised poker.

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thanks for the reply. I would guess that when you start becomin a success at the high stakes tables, you could honestly care less about wearing any logo.

Do you know how much money some of these players get sponsered for? Of course they still care about getting sponsered even if they are playing at high stakes tables.

I'm not sure weather it was mike mataso but he was in a interview and was offered 25k by FTP to wear the patch at the wsop something like that that interview was pretty old

Win the WSOP main event and you will get insta sponsored.

otari said:

Win the WSOP main event and you will get insta sponsored.

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Not necessarily - if you make the final table you'll definitely be paid to wear patches while you're playing the final table (if you want to - Darvin Moon refused, for example), but there's no guarantee of ongoing sponsorship. See Jerry Yang or Jamie Gold.

The reality is that for a previously unknown player, luckboxing a major tournament win isn't enough these days - you still need the qualities that I discussed above to make you an attractive sponsorship candidate.

Back in the day it used to be pretty standard that if you made it onto any WSOP main event featured table (not necessarily the final table) then one of the sites would pay you your $10K buyin to wear their patch. Since the collapse of the big sites in America, I sincerely doubt that's the case anymore.

triplesyxx said:

thanks for the reply. I would guess that when you start becomin a success at the high stakes tables, you could honestly care less about wearing any logo.

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By all reports the deals vary and again, everything has probably changed since Black Friday. Some used to just get 100% rakeback + $30 an hour for every hour they played on the site and even for a high stakes pro, that can add up if you're logging a lot of hours.

Higher tier pros obviously got paid to appear in ads and whatnot and wear patches on TV, some will have gotten their tournament buyins paid for them too.

If you're a nobody who just happens to start doing well at the high stakes or binks a couple of live TV tables, the rakeback + hourly rate is probably the best you can hope for.

100% rakeback plus 30 an hour, so sick

OzExorcist said:

Not necessarily - if you make the final table you'll definitely be paid to wear patches while you're playing the final table (if you want to - Darvin Moon refused, for example),

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Just an FYI - Darvin refused because everyone wanted a one year deal. He would have done it if it was just the FT time. He didn't want to tie himself down for that long. HPT finally gave him a deal he could live with that was more flexible.

LOL - colour me amazed on two counts then. One that a site actually thought they'd want Darvin Moon for an entire year (even if he had've won, he's basically unmarketable) and two, that that's the reason he said no

OzExorcist said:

LOL - colour me amazed on two counts then. One that a site actually thought they'd want Darvin Moon for an entire year (even if he had've won, he's basically unmarketable) and two, that that's the reason he said no

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It's a speculative investment. If the guy wins (Darvin or whoever they get to wear their logo) they will be able to get great returns on that investment. No one who wins is unmarketable, though they might be limited. But they might as well go for a whole year - when you think of it a whole year contract would probably not cost them much more than just a "wear out patch as long as you're still in" contract.

If the guy tanks and goes out 8th (yeah, I'm looking at you Salaburu) well then at least they got some quality TV time of their logo/name being displayed. Although in this case I wonder if that was a good thing for someone like Tournament Poker Edge to associate themselves with the one guy who was described as a combination of the worst aspects of Mike Matusow and Phil Hellmuth. But like they say, any publicity is good publicity.

For a while there I know Stars was sponsoring some online only players who didn't play super high but who had a huge following anyway. Mostly huge volume guys or huge pro ongoing prop bets with amazing traffic to their blogs/twitter.

WVHillbilly said:

For a while there I know Stars was sponsoring some online only players who didn't play super high but who had a huge following anyway. Mostly huge volume guys or huge pro ongoing prop bets with amazing traffic to their blogs/twitter.

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See http://www.pokerstars.com/team-pokerstars/

MediaBLITZ said:

It's a speculative investment. If the guy wins (Darvin or whoever they get to wear their logo) they will be able to get great returns on that investment. No one who wins is unmarketable, though they might be limited. But they might as well go for a whole year - when you think of it a whole year contract would probably not cost them much more than just a "wear out patch as long as you're still in" contract.

If the guy tanks and goes out 8th (yeah, I'm looking at you Salaburu) well then at least they got some quality TV time of their logo/name being displayed. Although in this case I wonder if that was a good thing for someone like Tournament Poker Edge to associate themselves with the one guy who was described as a combination of the worst aspects of Mike Matusow and Phil Hellmuth. But like they say, any publicity is good publicity.

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Oh I dunno... I'd argue that Darvin Moon was basically unmarketable.

If he had any appeal at all it was very narrow. He wasn't really likely to play many other large-buy in televised tournaments - let alone actually make the televised part of them, so there's not much bang to be had from putting a logo on him after his guaranteed TV time at the main event was up.

He wasn't billboard or advertising material, and he wasn't much of a talker. He was a nobody before he won the main event, so media interest in him would die about a week after the tournament finished. He was a self-confessed luckbox, easily the worst player at his final table, so it's not like they could sell him based on his poker knowledge.

Quite simply, I think money spent on him would have been money wasted.

you still get paid between 5 and 30k for each of your patches at current Main event ft's. With higher prices for the better stacked payers going in and those more likely to crush.

OzExorcist said:

Oh I dunno... I'd argue that Darvin Moon was basically unmarketable.

If he had any appeal at all it was very narrow. He wasn't really likely to play many other large-buy in televised tournaments - let alone actually make the televised part of them, so there's not much bang to be had from putting a logo on him after his guaranteed TV time at the main event was up.

He wasn't billboard or advertising material, and he wasn't much of a talker. He was a nobody before he won the main event, so media interest in him would die about a week after the tournament finished. He was a self-confessed luckbox, easily the worst player at his final table, so it's not like they could sell him based on his poker knowledge.

Quite simply, I think money spent on him would have been money wasted.

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Well like I said - I don't think a one year deal would cost much more than a couple days of final table TV time - so corporate might as well get that.

And yeah, I see what you are saying (and don't totally disagree) but marketing is about the spin and Darvin actually had some good spin angles (everyman, lumberjack, you just need to get lucky, "aww shucks, I aint a good poker player", etc) that HPT was able to capitalize on. I think a marketing firm would have had a ball with a guy like that. No way is he a spokesman though. He certainly couldn't be used in a conventional sense like Negreanu, Ivey or Hellmuth (in other words, real poker players). I think Hellmuth, Matusow or Salaburu are much tougher marketing angles ("he may be a dick head but he can play poker" - lol). But Darvin's appeal really has nothing to do with poker itself.