Why The Major Poker Tours Needs To Ban Sponsorship Of Players

I have been an opponent of players wearing iron patches and clothing emblazoned with an Online Poker sites logo since the first Party Poker hat made an appearance on television. Now don’t get me wrong, I have a ton of gear from numerous different poker sites, I just don’t think they should be allowed at televised poker tables.

In this article I’ll give two reasons why I am against the practice of sponsored players, and how I feel it negatively impacts the game of poker.

#1 — The different poker tours are allowing sites more sponsorship time than the actual sponsors! Think about it, by allowing an Online Poker site to hand some final table participant $20,000 an Online Poker site has just bought about 44 minutes of advertising time!

A better way to get money out of the sites is to allow them to advertise on the felt, and then take a certain percentage of the money and add it to the prize-pool as an overlay. This would undoubtedly bring in more players, and the money they are losing from not being allowed to wear a hat and t-shirt is made up in the extra prize-money. And nothing attracts more players than added prize-money!

Seriously, stop letting these online sites advertise on the cheap! Not only has the amount of gear -and tackiness-increased exponentially, but it is likely to only get worse. In the future I’m seeing poker players looking like Nascars, with all sorts of advertisements on their outfits. Think I’m kidding? Take a look at how Phil Hellmuth enters an event, or players who are wearing a site’s hat, t-shirt, hoodie, sunglasses, pants, and most likely socks and underwear!

Additionally, if a big name player is sponsored by an online site and makes a televised final table, the site should be allowed the right of first refusal to place a small logo in front of that player at the regular advertising rates: If and only if they can prove the player was sponsored before the event began. Perhaps at registration the player could include Team Full Tilt or Team PokerStars . This way we eliminate a site’s ability to just back a horse after it already wins the race (in this case making the final table).

#2 - Having all these strange logos and tacky outfits on the players must have a negative impact on how legitimate advertisers spend their dollars. I can’t imagine that a company like Budweiser would look at a televised poker tournament and think “Hey, there’s a good way to spend some of our advertising budget!” I’m sure if they were going to advertise in a poker tournament they would just follow the model of the Online Poker sites: wait for a player to make a televised event, and then offer them some money to wear their gear.

Is it any wonder that the WPT’s heyday was when they enforced their strict dress code for the televised portion of the event? I’m not privy to their advertising information, but I have to suspect that when they started allowing logos to appear on clothing that they lost some advertising revenue. Not only would a legitimate advertiser feel they were being swindled, but it just brought the classiness of the show down a couple of notches.