Top 10 Stories of 2016, #9: GPL Holds Season 1

This year’s Top Stories are brought to you by the VerStandig Law Firm, LLC. Combining a keen understanding of the gaming world and an equally keen understanding of the law, Mac VerStandig and his colleagues are devoted to fighting on behalf of the poker community and its members.

Poker doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Nothing does. So, while change to the poker industry often comes internally, it can just as easily come from outside influences.

The e-sports is industry is one with many parallels to that of poker. From the demographics to the mechanics of the competition, there are many similarities between the two. As an industry, e-sports is in the midst of a growth explosion not unlike that experienced by poker in the early 2000s, except on a far more massive scale.

If people pay to watch video games, why wouldn’t they pay to follow a spectacular poker game?

Hundreds of millions of people spend their time and money on e-sports as fans of the games. It might sound crazy that so many people would support an industry built around watching people play video games, but it’s really not so wild — Isn’t that also an accurate description of professional sports?

Alex Dreyfus took a look at the burgeoning e-sports industry and thought he saw an untapped market for a similar product in poker. Dreyfus has never been a man afraid to push the envelope, having backed and participated in numerous projects in the poker industry. He believed if people were willing to watch video game competitions, there was a market for a similar product in poker.

“If people pay to watch video games, why wouldn’t they pay to follow a spectacular poker game?” he said in a late 2015 interview with PokerNews after details of the nascent Global Poker League were announced.

It was an ambitious undertaking. Dreyfus rounded up backing in the form of $4.9 million in venture capital funding and set to work making his latest idea a reality. In February 2015, in conjunction with the American Poker Awards and the associated Global Poker Index — another Dreyfus pet project — the GPL held its very first draft.

The Draft

Originally, Dreyfus detailed a plan for the GPL that would see individuals outside the poker world — business owners, entrepreneurs and such — own and operate the 12 GPL franchises based in 12 different cities around the globe. Those plans never came to fruition and Dreyfus ended up recruiting a number of prominent poker players to serve as franchise managers. The likes of Liv Boeree, Maria Ho, Faraz Jaka and Mike McDonald signed on to lead the way.

A lottery was held to determine the draft order and Max Pescatori and the Rome Emperors lucked into the right to select first overall.

Before it could be determined who would be the top draft pick in the GPL, a list of eligible draftees had to be made. Dreyfus put out a call for the top 1,000 players as ranked by his aforementioned GPI to opt in to the draft pool. Players were told to review a prospective contract and the GPL began generating some controversy among the community before it even really got underway.

Some felt the contract …

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