On April 5, 2012, a new and different kind of poker series is set to hold its first event. The iSeries Live tournament series is attempting to make poker more profitable for players by allowing betting on the poker action. The players then benefit by earning a portion of the money wagered for or against them.
This is an interesting idea in that poker players generally must put up all the money and do not share in the rake generated by the establishment or tournament sponsor. Many have also complained that the leading poker organizations do not share in the advertising revenue generated by TV commercials and other ads. After years of poker on ESPN and other networks, it seems rather obvious that organizations have no interest in sharing ad revenue to help the players.
The iSeries Live tournaments, which are being run by Poker Royalty, attempt to do a similar thing. But the extra profits for players will come from the wagering action instead of ad revenue. At least for the first tournament, which is in Dublin on April 5th, PaddyPower will be accepting all the wagers.
Where this can be great is that a few top players may get easy money. If the betting activity gets substantial enough, you may see freerolls where the poker players don’t even have to put up a buyin. While some would argue this is good for the game, I just don’t see the betting activity being substantial enough to support more than a couple dozen players.
By the way, this event is not on TV, but it will be live on the Internet at iSeriesLive.com.
Eventually, this series would need to get on TV to raise enough betting funds to help more than the elite circle of friends that will always get invited to these events.
To really help poker, it would be nice to have some qualifying tournaments instead of just inviting poker pros. The qualifying tournaments would be normal buy-in events, and that money could increase the prizepool. You could even have the tournament as a freeroll for certain invited players and increase the prizepool by satelliting in qualifying players from real-money satellite tournaments or other events.
There is definitely plenty of room to grow for this overall idea. Again, though, iSeries Live is probably going to only help a handful of circle-jerk elitists if it relies solely on sharing of betting funds to compensate the players. Plus, it’s just not going to be fun to watch unless you add other people to the mix and introduce qualifiers so regular folks also have a chance to get in on the action.
Look for the first iSeries Live tournament on April 5, 2012. According to the website, the tournament starts at 5 p.m. GMT.