Agents of change

The agency landscape has been evolving for a few years now. Since Poker Royalty launched as the first agency in 2003, we have seen the industry grow significantly and many new agencies have entered the market. However, recent events have seen some of these agencies go out of business, or at least close the shutters for a while. Poker Royalty's founder Brian Balsbaugh had the foresight a few years ago to diversify beyond the North American players that built the business and employed me to replicate the success of the Vegas-based headquarters by doing what we do best: signing the best players from worldwide territories where poker offers legitimate revenue streams for operators, and building relationships with those operators.

From the outset we knew this year’s WSOP was going to be unlike those of recent years. PokerStars and Full Tilt have traditionally dominated the player sponsorship deals. This year, they couldn't spend a penny. Sponsorships at the Series were down 90% on 2010, but Poker Royalty continued to bring patch deals (albeit smaller deals) to some of our US-based players.

THE US CHANGE

North America will always be the vital artery of our business so we must continue to build relationships and talk to the stars of tomorrow today. We also knew that other companies who had traditionally hired agents at the Series were no longer in a position to offer players feature table or final table deals. This year therefore represented a significant opportunity for other sites to get incredible value on player deals. This value can be recognised through the heavily discounted price it cost to patch up a player compared to previous years and also the fact that due to the live broadcast of the Main Event on ESPN, they were getting even more coverage than before.

I should also explain that traditionally Stars and Tilt would only pay patched up players at the Main Event feature table if that person was seen playing a hand on the edited version of the ESPN broadcast, but that took a few weeks to go out. This year the feature table broadcast went out with only a 30 minute delay, guaranteeing players would get paid. More importantly though, it guaranteed the companies the brand exposure they are looking for.

Poker Royalty was the only agency operating at the Main Event, so any players lucky enough to be selected to play at the feature tables were approached by our agents and asked certain questions to see if they fit the sponsoring companies’ demographic. The key criteria were things like age and current playing status i.e. were they a pro or amateur? Some sites want the player to be a pro already, while others want amateur players because their targets are beginners to the game.

AGENT X

In terms of day-to-day working practices, it was certainly a very different experience this year. The previous two years there was extremely strong competition between the agents, and the Amazon room sometimes resembled the Wall Street trading floor, with agents hustling for position. I remember it got to the point where the agents were waiting for the players in valet parking and I even saw some agents waiting outside the bathroom for players on break. Signing up players is important but there are some lines that Poker Royalty agents won't cross. We don’t stalk poker players to their hotel, and where possible we try not to make deals in the hallway I must admit I like the competitive atmosphere as it forces you to bring your absolute ‘A’ game.

Being a good agent requires a unique skillset and the ability to keep a cool head. You need stamina, concentration and the ability to close a deal with a player and the sponsoring site in a matter of minutes. A lot of the players knew that we were the only guys offering deals on the floor and knew that they would not get an offer elsewhere, so this again made the job somewhat easier this year. Having said that, having a tough skin has always been crucial as knock-backs are frequent.

Poker players have a natural amount of suspicion in them anyway and it can be hard to patch them up when you can't actually give them money there and then. You probably remember Darvin Moon, the logger from Oakland who finished runner-up in the WSOP Main Event 2009. I was the first to approach him, but for whatever reason he just thought the money we were offering was too good to be true. For someone who had earned every cent in his life, it was just too much of a jump to accept that he would get money for just sticking on a patch!

CAUSE AND EFFECT

I'm often asked whether patching players up actually has a tangible effect. My answer is a resolute yes. If a player possesses the qualities that resonate with a poker site's demographic then the value that can be harnessed from that player is positively disproportionate to the cost of sponsoring them. Initial research Poker Royalty conducted showed some sponsors saw up to a 50% increase in traffic during the live broadcast. We are working with some of this year’s November Nine and the attention they are getting in their home countries is phenomenal.

Take Samuel Holden, for example. Since he has come home, he’s appeared in the national newspapers, on peak time breakfast television and in an interview with BBC Radio 1, the second most popular station in the United Kingdom. Wherever possible, he is in logo for 888 or will mention them in the interview. That sort of exposure and reach to new audiences is just so valuable. Imagine listening to or viewing his story if you were a complete novice. The sort of money these guys are playing for captures their imagination and if they have never played poker before and they see a guy playing for $8m wearing a company logo, where do you think they are going to open up their first poker account?

The companies can leverage these opportunities for three months and even then it's not over. November Niners are not forgotten too quickly and if they go on to win the championship, they become immortal in the poker world. In this period of uncertainty we are doing all we can to continue to talk to players and sites to find new ways to bring our clients money. As always, necessity is the mother of invention, so we're getting more creative in finding ways to do this. But the sponsorship model is definitely changing, and the way some agencies used to do business is no longer sustainable. For example, consistent quality is something we have always looked for before signing a player. Agents signing 50 players hoping to get five of them deals just isn't a model that can work post-Black Friday.