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The poker industry’s partnership deals with top football teams. Poker has made significant strides in ensuring that it stays relevant even a decade after the poker boom of the early 2000s.
Increased exposure through TV broadcasts have certainly been a big part of that, with World Series of Poker and World Poker tour televised events garnering the most shares of the poker-viewing audience.
It also helped that internationally recognised celebrities like Ben Affleck and Jennifer Tilly have also taken to the sport; and have even been competitive at tournaments. And of course there are the movies that served to further glamourise the sport, from the James Bond reboot Casino Royale, to the more recent Runner Runner.
A Partnering of Greats
A big promotional push which the poker industry itself has been actively pushing, though, is partnerships with other well-loved sports. Most significantly, recent years have seen the world’s most popular card game team up with the world’s most popular sport through events and promos meant to further broaden the appeal of both games. Some poker operators have gone ahead and forged sponsorships with popular tennis stars like Boris Becker and Rafael Nadal.
Others, though, upped the ante by partnering up with whole superstar teams. Gaming company bwin.party's PartyPoker brand has made multiple deals with top-rated club Manchester United, which began with the Road to Old Trafford event last year that pit more than 170 poker enthusiasts against each other while meeting some of the biggest names – past and present – of the club, such as Norman Whiteside, Dwight Yorke, Darren Fletcher, and many more.
Sponsorship Expansion Teams
For early 2014, PartyPoker has gone ahead and set up two collaborative promos so far. First up was the Manchester United Mission tournament where the winners were granted, among other things, the opportunity to play against the football club’s players themselves. And more recently, the online poker operator launched the Poker Champions Cup, an event that involves not just the Red Devils, but also superstar teams Juventus, RSC Anderlecht, Real Madrid, and Olympique de Marseille; an event no footie fan will surely want to miss out on.
In the last few years, poker came into the international scene in a big way, and it makes perfect sense that they further this popularity by associating with a sport that enjoys the same kind of worldwide appeal. With a partnership this big, we may just be seeing the poker industry’s fame shoot through the stratosphere, give or take a few more years.
Written by Ketan Patel
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