Calistri's Corner

In baseball there is one field.  Hockey has one rink.  NASCAR has one track.  Basketball has one court.  When major sports franchises grant exclusive media coverage, the spectator is not necessarily the worse off for it.  The exclusive media provider shows you all the action.  The commentators are there to enhance, not provide, the experience of watching a game play out. 

We can debate the semantics of whether poker is a sport, but the fact of the matter is that it is being tracked into a sports media model.  For the last two years, Harrah’s has sold exclusive reporting rights to the WSOP.  In 2006, Card Player paid for a level of exclusivity for tournament reporting. This year, Bluff Magazine, who subcontracted through PokerNews, coughed up the bucks for the rights.   Recently, the WPT has sold out to an exclusive reporting provider.  Card Player has exclusivity for all WPT championship events, which precludes reporters from other media outlets to go inside the ropes (technically they can ask for a WPT escort for 15 minutes inside the ropes, but a tournament can’t be reported under those conditions).    

But until the final table, or the rare heads-up tournament, there is no one single playing field in poker.  A poker tournament evolves from a base of dozens, or in some cases hundreds, of tables; each table providing its own separate drama.  There aren’t nine or eleven players on a team.  There are hundreds to thousands of players.  Even with a plethora of reporting outlets cooperating with each other (as they traditionally have) to provide readers with the richest experience and most accurate details, a poker tournament represents larger challenges than most sports.  Reporters don’t just enhance the experience, they decide what it will be.  With so many players (known and unkown) and so many tables, selection dictates how the event it perceived.  It’s not just the details they report; it’s how well they make their decisions on what they report.  In the case of poker, exclusive media just ends up to equating to limited coverage; where the readers end up with reports that are often biased toward professionsals over chip leaders and scewed by the many business relationships media providers have with individual players.

My rant today was brought to you by PokerWire’s withdrawal from the tournament reporting space.  PokerWire basically set the standard for chip count coverage and accuracy in tournament reporting.  When Tim Lavalli and I wrote our series of articles on the 2+million extra chips introduced into the 2006 WSOP Championship event, we relied heavily on PokerWire’s data because we knew it was likely to be the most accurate.  PokerWire’s radio show was creative, informative, and fresh.  They gave a lot to our “sport,” but feel that with the growing number of media restrictions in poker that they can not continue to provide what they feel our game deserves.  I suspect their decision will be mirrored by others in the future. 

There are more losses than gains with exclusivity.  The readers certainly lose.  And truth be told, the exclusive online media provider loses.  They usually pay a pretty nice buck for the privelege, and don’t really gain incremental traffic.  Most viewers, if they were anything like me, had windows open to multiple media providers and read them all anyway.  Harrah’s and the WPT get short-term monitary gain from these contracts - but lose visibility to the events and sport they are supposedly trying to promote as more media providers toss in their poker reporting towel.                     

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized.