So, this is such a good idea it's kind of hard to believe this hasn't been done before honestly.
- Invite-only KO event
- 48 streamers invited to play
- poker plrs + other games/esports
- Everyone streams
- $50,000 prize pool
- "Raid" viewers on KO
- All 48 streamers stream on Twitch
- Everyone has 3 lives. (I guess like a multi-stack tournament? - wasn't aware partypoker supported this tbqh)
- If you knock someone out for the 3rd and final time, you get their bounty and *also their viewers*
So this is new to me, but apparently the kids are calling these "raids" and in fact the Twitch platform has support for this built-in.
When a streamer ends their streamer, with the /raid command they can send all their viewers to watch another stream.
So as a Twitch streamer, when you knock someone out, all their viewers automatically come over to you.
That's *brilliant* for loads of reasons. The shit-talking here when another group come over will be off the charts.
As I say, it seems such a natural fit for a KO tournament that it's hard to believe no one has tried it before.
As a viewer you get to hop around 48 different streams (watching @jaimestaples and see him in a big pot with someone else? presumably you can jump to their stream and see their hole cards and hear their thoughts)
There's also a 49th stream, featuring the back-out-of-hibernation @Joeingram1 and @MariaHo, doing overall event coverage. Hopefully cards up coverage?
And then as a streamer, there's a big opportunity to gain some new followers, brought over to you on a raid if you knock them out.
Should be a really fun event for all players and streamers. For only $50k in the prize pool (+ the costs of the stream), it seems like an absolutely bargain for the operator.
Honestly, only negative I see here is it's felt all a little rushed - to me this is a big deal that deserves some build-up. But from what I can tell, this was all finalized in the last 24 to 48 hours.
I'd love to see down the line the concept taken further with a fully interactive web page where you can quickly switch between the different streamers on each table.
Update - looked like exactly what Party poker are doing. Impressive turnaround.
Especially relevant with today's news that GG's relationship with the WSOP extends: These are my main takeaways from Flutter's Q3 financial results this week as it pertains to poker (thread 👇)
- PokerStars division (includes sports + casino) flat YoY
- in constant currency, up 5%
- The "gaming" segment (casino + poker), up 6% cc
However, in that, they reported (only in relative figures, in cc)
🎲 casino +32%
🏅sports +3%
🃏 Poker -10%
So as they quickly pointed out, this is "returning to pre-Covid run-rates." Which is accurate. Pre-flutter, online poker at TSG has been down 10%+ every quarter since Q4 2018 (black line in chart below)
So this week, along with the regular content - of which we're still snowed under and have a large backlog, it's been a mad busy time and with PSPC starting at the weekend, it's not going to quieten down any time soon - we have been having some fun looking back at 2018.
We've done curations this week on our top 20 exclusive articles and top 20 longer-form features - both are in front of the paywall (but not the articles they link to - psyche!) so feel free to check them out:
And today I curated "Twelve Stories that Shaped the Year" - 12 rather opinionated picks by moi, one story for each month of 2018, that I think encapsulated a key theme last year. Or I just really liked the story.