Five Thoughts: The GPL’s Marketing Fail, ESPN’s Stale Jokes and the End of the UKIPT

I am not dead and neither is my career. In fact, I’m back this week with Five Thoughts that includes a message for all the haters, another for the Global Poker League and a third for ESPN.

Plus, it looks like it will soon be the end of more than one era in European poker and one player is threatening to win it all on the World Poker Tour without winning a thing.

The Paul Publicity Punt Chad Chokes on Stale Jokes With or Without Winning The End of an Era If You Can’t Stand The Heat

1. The Paul Publicity Punt Aaron Paul

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity. If that’s true, the number of column inches I have already devoted to criticizing the Global Poker League has done as much to promote the product as the weekly action recaps run by PokerNews. Should league founder Alexandre Dreyfus believe it, he will no doubt be pleased to see the GPL’s name appear here once again this week, even if it is to point out yet another failure.

The league’s biggest and possibly only star was scheduled to play an online match this week. While actor Aaron Paul may very well have beat Jonathan Jaffe 2-1 heads up, even the small handful of people who tuned into the GPL’s coverage of the match weren’t really able to watch him do it.

A GPL press release explained later that Paul played from the set of his new Hulu series, The Path, but even with all the camera equipment on the set of the show, the league couldn’t manage to conjure up an image of Paul playing? Jaffe’s webcam worked just fine and he provided a little witty-but-one-sided banter playing against a Paul avatar.

Paul is not a poker expert by any means, but he’s the one player in the entire league that has the on-camera presence and personality to help sell this thing to the masses. The GPL’s inability to get him on camera during the match, and the decision not to delay until they could, was a massive marketing fail and a missed opportunity by an organization that’s quickly running out of chances, whether bad publicity is good or not.

GPL Results, Standings and Schedule After Week 11 2. Chad Chokes on Stale Jokes Norman Chad

ESPN’s coverage of the 2016 World Series of Poker Main Event finally began to focus on more than just William Kassouf this week as they moved on to highlight some key hands with several players who actually will make the November Nine when the coverage eventually catches up.

With his constant chatter, it was beginning to seem like Kassouf was replacing long-time color man Norman Chad, although perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. I mean, if I have to hear how one more player got …

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