President and CEO Adam Pliska of the World Poker Tour doesn’t accept the premise that the poker “boom” is over. He recently did an interview with Card Player.
Pliska has been president and chief executive officer of the tour since 2009, when he led the tour from a single tour built around $10,000 to $25,000 buyins to a multi-pronged tour that allowed buy ins of much less money.
He has also seen many changes, the most radical being that the tour is no longer subsidized by major international poker sites, a fact brought about by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.
This is actually a positive development, he says. “The online sites saw the success of the show and came in and subsidized the shows, but then after a while we were forced to change in the wake of 2006 and the UIGEA. You have to adjust, but there is good news in all of this. The poker market has diversified, and while that might not give you the same windfalls that came in the gold rush boom times, it gives you a more stable base as a company.”
At the same time the WPT has expanded overseas to China, South Africa and other countries. Pliska believes the poker boom is still going on: My response is that the poker boom has not stopped, it’s just continued to move. Newer areas are more educated, having several years of mainstream poker coverage to look back at. We had 888 players in our event this year on the Chinese island of Sanya.”
He adds, “And from our perspective these new opportunities are great, because we are a very agile company. You can come in with a good idea and there are only one or two levels of yes and no. That has helped us a lot expanding from 14 events up to nearly 70. Quite frankly, after that, I came to the conclusion that perhaps we had expanded too far. I don’t expect us to move up to 80 or 90 events. I think that we are in a nice place now.”
The role of the televised tournaments, he says, has changed from educating people about the game to reminding people that, “poker is alive and well.” “And I believe that is good for us, that is good for the WSOP and Heartland Poker Tour and all of the other tours. We are getting the message out and reminding people the game is out there and it is dynamic and growing,” he said.
The rise of social media has been a positive thing for poker, says Pliska. “It really has improved us. It’s the poker community, so there are a lot of very passionate people. When we do something that people don’t like, you do get a lot of comments but that’s perfectly fine. Even if only 10 or 15 percent of it is constructive, that’s still a great help.”
At the same time the TV show has shifted to “younger, edgier, sexier programming, he says. “We wanted to treat poker as a sport. In sports, people are passionate, they swear, they get frustrated. You saw more of the things that actually happen when you play. The show now is a far more genuine portrayal of what it feels like to go through the experience of a final table.”
In the tour’s 15th season he expects to see an even bigger embrace of media. “The World Poker Tour is going to focus on making sure that things are personal to people, special and as seamless as possible, whether it’s playing online, coming into a tournament, going to a party in Sanya or an Alpha8 event. We are going to push ourselves this year in ways that we haven’t,” he said.
