January 3, 2006
Indeed, backroom hustlers are becoming cable-TV stars thanks to ESPN, Travel Channel, Bravo, and other channels that carry texas holdem poker tournaments. "The Prima deal opened a lot of our eyes that we've become celebrities," says Clonie Gowen, a former Miss Teen Oklahoma who won a 2003 tournament in Costa Rica and now endorses Full Tilt texas holdem poker. "Tiger [Woods] does it with Nike, only we don't get as much."
Conference attendees will also enjoy presentations from other high-level executives from PartyGaming, Bicycle Casino and several other top companies in the texas holdem poker sector, $1,000,000 freeroll at paradise texas holdem poker while taking in the breathtaking surroundings of Nassau's luxurious Wyndham Resort in the Bahamas.
The conference will feature a broad range of texas holdem poker-related content, with lectures and discussions on legal and regulatory issues, technology, marketing, and mergers and acquisitions, amongst other things.
NOT EVERYONE PLAYS. When one of the stars is on a site, traffic jumps, points out Prima Texas Holdem poker Chief Operating Officer John Dougherty, who says 1,000 folks may sign on just to watch Vaswani play. Overall, he says, traffic has jumped fivefold, to 25,000 a day, in the last year for the 30 Prima sites.
Still, promoting texas holdem poker on the tube isn't a laydown winner. Many corporations refuse to sponsor TV tournaments, and most cable channels won't allow players to be shown wearing shirts with the logos of texas holdem poker sites, fearing that they'll run afoul of Justice Dept. guidelines against promoting illegal gambling. Still, some sites get around that problem: FullTilt uses logos that promote its instructional site, not the texas holdem poker-playing site, says Bob Wolf, a marketing consultant to FullTilt. When Hellmuth won the $500,000 on NBC, the logos on his shirt and hat dropped the .com designation.
With the climate of the international texas holdem poker market fluctuating constantly, the industry is looking to a newly developed conference hosted by an I-gaming event company, River City.
The keynote speaker of the December 8-9 conference is World Texas Holdem Poker Tour founder and CEO Steven Lipscomb. With the WPT recognized as one of the top organizations in texas holdem poker, people will surely want to hear the wisdom of this industry leader. There is no doubt attendees will learn something from the man who built possibly the most recognizable brand in the highly competitive field.
