If you’ve ever wanted to learn from the pros, now may be your chance. Poker News Daily columnist Annie Duke, 2004 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event champion Greg Raymer, and eight-time bracelet winner Erik Seidel have teamed up to launch ProPlayLive.
The website bills itself as “The Poker School that Never Closes.” ProPlayLive will set a student back $19.95 per month with a one-time sign-up fee of $49.95, which actually includes the first month of service. Players can buy five months in advance (dubbed “Bulk Buy”) and ProPlayLive will waive the sign-up fee as a goodwill gesture. Major credit cards are accepted and the site is slated to take PayPal in the near future. The monthly rates and sign-up fees are on par with those found at popular poker training sites such as CardRunners and PokerXFactor, regarded by many as the market leaders.
Beverly Pipes, Director of Customer Service at ProPlayLive, gave her take on what separates the site from others like it in the industry: “There are a number of good poker training sites in the marketplace today, but their instructors are predominantly online poker players who the general public has never heard of. Our approach was to offer great poker training for both the online player and the live game player who visits casino poker rooms or plays home games and do it with instructors that have proven live game success.”
Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond recently launched Bluefire Poker, which gained notoriety by challenging U.S. President Barack Obama or any member of Congress to a poker match, offering $1 million for charity if the member of government could beat a Bluefire Poker instructor. However, the site was not taken up on its promotion. Galfond is a WSOP bracelet holder, having taken down a $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha with Rebuys tournament in 2008 for $817,000. It was one of the largest sums won by an event winner last year, as Galfond navigated through an experienced final table that included Daniel Negreanu, David Benyamine, Johnny Chan, John Juanda, and Ultimate Bet pro Phil Hellmuth.
Over 100 videos are currently a part of the library at ProPlayLive. Besides Duke, Raymer, and Seidel, other instructors include Tom McEvoy, Bill Chen, Alex Outhred, John Lukas, Mark Kroon, and Shawn Rice. Videos available include five hours of the PokerStars Sunday Million, four hours of the PokerStars Nightly Fifty Grand, and a variety of cash games. Each video is labeled along with what poker skills it emphasizes, including tight cash game play, the squeeze play, chip accumulation versus survival, and reasons to avoid playing small cards in Omaha.
Duke, who is currently a contestant on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” commented in a press release by the upstart poker training site, “For the tiny cost of joining ProPlayLive, players get top level instruction that would cost them literally thousands of dollars if they hired poker professionals like myself on a one-on-one basis. The value to anyone who joins is tremendous – it’s really a no-brainer.” Duke won the 2004 WSOP Tournament of Champions, banking a massive $2 million. She defeated Hellmuth heads-up and her brother, Full Tilt Poker pro Howard Lederer, finished in third. That year, she took down her first (and so far only) WSOP bracelet in a $2,000 buy-in Omaha High-Low Eight or Better tournament, adding another $137,000 to her bank account. Seidel took third in that event for $38,000 and contributed money on the first episode of “Celebrity Apprentice” on March 1st by paying $5,000 for a single cupcake.
Many of the instructors at ProPlayLive are part of the WSOP Academy, a roving training school that heads to some of the world’s premier casinos. The next Academy is slated for April 4th and 5th at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, a few days prior to the WSOP Circuit Event stop there, which begins on April 11th.