The first day of action is in the books for the Global Poker League and, for the most part, the day has to be viewed as a solid start for the burgeoning poker-as-sports organization. While there were some very good things that came out of the day’s proceedings, there were definitely some things that needed to be worked on and perhaps even changed altogether.
First, the good things.
The overall play by the 12 teams in the GPL – playing online over software developed for the GPL and their specific needs – was very entertaining. The 12 teams, divided into the GPL Eurasia and the GPL Americas, each played two Six-Max sit and gos on Tuesday, with each team sending out one player for each event. While it might have been easy for the players to not take the event seriously, it seemed that they were fighting for each pot just as seriously as if they were contesting a real tournament.
With the cards face up for those watching over GPL.tv or Twitch (the Poker Central broadcast was beset by “technical issues”), the audience got to see the players make some moves on occasion and how important it was for remaining viable in the sit and go. Commentators Sam Grafton and Griffin Benger did a decent job of offering their view as to what would go on with the play and their counterparts in the studio, Laura Cornelius and Eric Danis, did a fine job with their pre- and post-show duties. By the end of the day’s action, the standings for Day 1 came out like this:
GPL EURASIA POINTS WINS
Paris Aviators 10 1
Hong Kong Stars 9 1
London Royals 6
Rome Emperors 6
Moscow Wolverines 5
Berlin Bears 0
GPL AMERICAS POINTS WINS
New York Rounders 10 1
Las Vegas Moneymakers 10
Montreal Nationals 9 1
Sao Paulo Metropolitans 4
L. A. SunSet 3
San Francisco Rush 0
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the play was Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates taking the bagel for the Berlin Bears. Taking both ends of his team’s two-fer on Tuesday, Cates was unable to score a single point for the Deutschland Bruins (running Big Slick into the Moscow Wolverines’ Dzmitry Urbanovich’s pocket Aces will do that). On the other end of the spectrum, Hong Kong manager Celina Kim looks brilliant for taking Raiden Kan, who picked up a key victory in Match #2 yesterday when he defeated the Rome Emperors’ Walter Treccarichi heads up to take the victory.
By far the coolest thing that occurred during the matches on Tuesday was the shout-out from international soccer superstar Neymar, who plays for the Brazilian National Team as well as FC Barcelona in the Spanish La Liga. Sent to the Sao Paulo Metropolitans, Neymar encouraged his countrymen – and Byron Kaverman, who took the baton for the Mets on Tuesday – to represent Brazil well. The pep talk didn’t seem to do well as the Mets stumbled to a less-than outstanding fourth place start to their season.
Now for the bad…
For something that was in the planning stages for several months (if not years), there were issues that arose during the broadcasts of the GPL that shouldn’t have occurred. Buffering of the live streams was a constant issue for viewers (in fairness, it seemed to get better as the day wore on) and was an immediate turnoff for some who came to see the show. There were audio problems that made it sound as if the commentary from Benger and Grafton was coming from a bathroom rather than a broadcast booth; echoing is an issue on broadcasts such as this and it can be thwarted with soundproofing material around the commentators (apparently something that wasn’t considered). The same issue affected Cornelius and Danis (not as severely, though), who also needed to be a little more “studio-like” rather than lounging in the…well, lounge…for the pre- and post-game shows.
The audience also wasn’t happy with the play of the GPL. Apparently people didn’t read the multitude of information that was out there regarding the GPL and how it would be played out, because many people came to the Twitch stream expecting to see PHYSICAL players actually sitting at a table playing poker. When they saw it was an online game, many were disappointed with that fact. Those fans also weren’t complimentary of the GPL game software, the commentators, the general concept of the GPL…I could go on, but as The Box says, “Critis gonna neg.”
Overall, the GPL had a good first day and there’s plenty to be able to grow off of. The GPL has already responded to one of the criticisms from fans – not being able to see the players in action – and is providing camera feeds of the players for today’s and Thursday’s heads up matches between the teams (right now, the Hong Kong Stars’ Randy ‘Nanonoko’ Lew is taking on the Moscow Wolverines’ Sergey Lebedev, with the cameras under their hole cards). There will be these little tweaks as the next few weeks pass by, so let’s give the GPL some time to get their feet under them as they look to give poker fans something new – and maybe even draw in some new casual fans along the way.
