Matchroom Sport, the producer, promoter, and distributor of the PartyPoker.com Premier League IV, which is underway right now at the M Casino in Las Vegas, won the Rob Gardner Award for Innovation at the 2009 European Poker Awards.
Players and industry experts from across Europe submitted their ballots for eight different categories, with the top five vote-getters for each award advancing to the final judging. A panel of eight judges then met during the Euro Finals of Poker at the Aviation Club de France (ACF) to determine the winners (except for the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was decided by the original voting). The winners were announced and presented with their gold trophies at a dinner banquet at the ACF.
Matchroom Sport is one of the preeminent producers of televised sports programming, concentrating primarily on the European market. Besides poker, Matchroom Sport also develops shows for boxing, darts, snooker, billiards, fishing, golf, and bowling. In addition to the increasingly popular PartyPoker.com Premier League, Matchroom Sport has also produced the Full Tilt Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge, the PartyPoker.com World Open, and the PKR Heads-Up Grand Slam.
“We are absolutely thrilled to have won the award for innovation at the European Poker Awards,” said Matchroom Sport’s Managing Director Eddie Hearn in a press release. “The news broke as we began the first heat of the PartyPoker.com Premier League Poker IV here in Las Vegas and it gave the team a real lift. We always feel we have a responsibility to grow the game and our innovative formats combined with our global distribution will hopefully help the game go from strength to strength.”
There were only two other nominees for the Rob Gardner Award for Innovation: Gene Gioa, creator of RealDealPoker.com, and Antanas “Tony G” Guoga, lead man of PokerNews.com, who created ChipMeUp. RealDealPoker.com, scheduled to launch in March, is a unique online poker room which uses real decks of cards which are scrambled and shuffled by the site’s automated “Cut N’ Shuffle” system. The order of the cards in the deck are captured on video and sent to a “Deck Matrix” system, which presents the deal to the online players. ChipMeUp is a poker staking community where players can raise funds to play in tournaments and investors can provide players with a portion of their buy-in in hopes of earning a return.
Tony G, who is currently competing in the PartyPoker.com Premier League, said, “If anyone was going to beat me to this award then it deserves to be Eddie and his team at Matchroom. They produce the best poker shows in the world and are always trying to raise the bar. The PartyPoker.com Premier League is my favorite tournament in poker and is seen by more countries than any other show in the world.”
Other winners at the 2009 European Poker Awards included Russia’s Vitaly Lunkin for Player of the Year, Italy/Australia’s Jeffrey Lisandro for Outstanding Tournament Performance, Finland’s Patrik Antonius for Internet Player of the Year, and Bruno Fitoussi for Lifetime Achievement.
