In an international conference organized by GPI owner Alex Dreyfus, world marketing leaders of the sports and poker industries gathered to see talks and presentations of experts from the European Poker Tour, the World Poker Tour as well as the Global Poker Index.
Major media agencies, business affiliates and stakeholders of the industry joined to learn about the newest of trends in online poker.
Probably the most interesting speech was carried out by Alex Dreyfus, who hosted the event and is currenyly an owner of both the Hendon Mob Database and GPI. He talked about the similarities between poker and major league sports. Dreyfus stated that sports and poker have the same values and features and therefore poker can use the same marketing and advertising channels as main stream sports.
He boldly stated that poker is already a mainstream sport. That is due to the fact that there are more people who watch poker streams and events broadcast live online than people watching sport events on TV.
The growing popularity of poker has brought over a hundred million poker players who play recreationally. There are many celebrities and athletes who play poker as well.
Dreyfus continued to present interesting facts and figures of the current state of poker. He explained that the chance of users to win a prize on a poker website is now 35% higher than on any other online gambling platform. He shared there were also many leading companies which organized poker events in order to raise funds for a non-profit cause.
The owner of GPI further said that poker had found its way into university courses as well, where Harvard lecturers of Law used poker strategies to improve their teaching methods.
Despite many claiming that poker has begun to decline, statistics state different – the popularity and the number of active poker players is still going up with a steady pace.
Dreyfus urged all poker operators to begin promoting poker the same way they would promote a mainstream sport. He stated that the GPI had signed contracts with big news agencies such as USA Today and Cinesports Network and he would continue to look for new partnerships.
He announced that even though the poker industry was relatively new compared to other, more conventional sports, it already brought high numbers. He is also sure that in the next year and a half, there will be major improvements in the poker industry.
Dreyfus explained that the first event to trigger a snowball effect in the industry would be the re-introduction of poker in California. The huge potential of California would invigorate other states as well. This new poker revolution would be the biggest the industry has seen, Dreyfus assured.
After Dreyfus ended his presentation, there were speeches by representatives of the European Poker Tour and the World Poker Tour carry out by Edgar Stuchly and Hermance Blum respectively. Both speeches urged for a collaboration between the marketing and advertising operations of the two organizations. Stuchly stated that despite the current success of EPT, operating in over fifty countries and translated live in twelve languages, there was still a lot of room to improve and grow.
