Is Poker Marketing Going in the Right Direction?

The first rule of marketing is understanding the product that you are trying to sell. With that in mind, is poker gambling? Is it gaming? E-sports? Is it a mind-sport? Is it deigning? And, If it’s all of these things, is it one more than the other? The second rule of marketing is understanding the people who want that product. With that in mind, are poker players gamblers, e-sport players, mind-athletes or degenerates? And, if they are all of these things, are they one more than the other.

Poker players are a bit different from other consumers in the sense that they have a vested interest in the wellbeing of the poker operators who provide the games and the ecosystem that they create. Sure, a person who likes to drink a particular brand of soda wants the soft drink company to be successful enough to continue to do so and maybe even root for the wider availability of that beverage but that person doesn’t feel like they are part of a community which relies on the tree being a critical mass to operate and therefore want the product presented in a positive light.

Every dollar spent on marketing poker this year likely came out of the rake paid last year so I do think poker players have a right to get annoyed when they think that it is being mis-spent. Historically, there have been clear overspends in certain quarters, a bunch of desperate ‘this thing will save us’ money dumps into one platform or on one demographic during periods of contraction. There have also been grotesquely large sums dropped onto the laps of famous sportspeople who did virtually nothing to promote the game.

The Poker Dream

A big part of marketing the game has always been to sell the poker dream. That used to be done by highlighting the old-school player, the gregarious character who had been there at the birth of televised poker. For a while, it was the player who had the big live tournament bink - the Cinderella Story. Then, it was someone from the game’s elite, an aspirational figure whose consistent appearances at final tables confirmed to all that poker is the skill game.

These days, poker is -- in large part -- marketed by accentuating the people who not only play, but also entertain. This is the era of the content creator in many industries and poker is no different, essentially outsourcing to contractors who have built up their following organically and are willing to expose that following to your product.

I believe that a creator who reaches an audience through Twitch, a blog, a vlog, a podcast, a short form skit or social media offers far more value to a poker operator than a genuine crusher. However, choosing which creators to platform and showcase, who to put poker commercial spend behind, is still in the domain of the industry’s marketing people.

So, to try to ascertain how we are doing as an industry, to get a litmus test on the direction poker marketing seems to be headed, I enlisted the help of nineteen poker players to answer a not so simple question - Do you feel like poker marketing went in the right direction in 2025 and what are the areas where the industry is still missing the mark?

The Majority Leant Negatively

Nine of the nineteen players polled leant negatively, believing that the industry needs to do better. Here’s what they said:

Nate Silver:

I don’t really think it’s going in the right direction. It seemed like 95% of the time when poker circulated into the larger discourse this year, it made a negative impression. However, I’m not sure what to do about that and I don't think it’s the content creators’ fault.

Jaime Staples:

“To achieve what ends” is the question I would like to ask back. To get the spreadsheet to increase the numbers on it? On that, we are probably doing fine. To make myself interested in what we are doing? No, we are not traveling in a great direction.
There is a push to create verticals with higher efficiency broadly in online poker. That's capitalism baby! That's games with lower or neutral edges so that a higher % can be captured by the sites. In Brick and Mortor situations, that's games that make more money than poker (all of which are pure games of chance of course). By extension, the stories that are being told about our game are with these aims in mind. Those incentives are not my incentives. I like the competition of poker, but that has no benefit to the bottom line of the owners.
My hope is that we have some visionaries that lead us forward into a world where the sanctity of poker, and its necessary edges, its business inefficiencies, are preserved because it's our culture. It's who we are, and we won't have it for long if it is dumbed down to a glorified blackjack.
People will still be interested but not the same people, and not for the same reasons that we all showed up here in the first place. I'm fairly pessimistic on our chances but I hold out hope someone with a lot of money gives it a go for the sake of it. Until then, we continue to compete with the game as it’s played - on the felt and otherwise.

Turlough McHugh:

It was disappointing that PokerGO had the WSOP mostly behind the paywall. I get it from a business point of view, but I just don’t see casual fans paying a subscription to watch poker. Is it growing the game? The price tag might be scaring away the very people poker needs to attract.

Rania Nasreddine:

For me, the poker marketing that is amplifying “tits out/semi-strippers who are content creators playing poker” is an example of brands capitalizing on all those women’s social media accounts to entice their existing client base. These brands don’t seem to care that the long term effect is continuing to make poker a ‘bros game’ with hints of vulgarity and seediness. Poker won’t be respected by the masses as a sport, won’t win the favorable laws in the US and won’t grow unless it comes out of the back room and into the masses living room.
Also, for the love of Jesus, so many poker players should not have control of their own Twitter/X. Things are posted and said which are despicable and make people claiming to have a career as a ‘professional’ poker player appear to be anything but. The Twitter Wars are a public relations nightmare for the industry on repeat. Note: no other professional sport except maybe boxing gets as dirty as we do.

Jim Reid:

Please, please, poker industry… unclog your ears and listen: we want HEROES, not villains. More pride, less snark. Let's all please stop calibrating to the lowest-common-denominator and start lifting up more of the positive elements of our shared love for this wonderful game.

Lukas Robinson:

I feel like as an industry a lot of time and effort is spent on drama. Even if we just used half of this time and effort into coming up with new ideas and content (like “Game of Gold”) this would be so much better for the game, get new people into it and give poker a better reputation overall.

Aaron Barone:

The sums of money that we play for are certainly enticing to the average viewer, and that is always going to be a draw. I would argue that the dream of being a professional poker player is still alive but it is different from how it is being portrayed. I recently saw an article touting a player as the most successful tournament player of the year because they had the most cashes, with no mention of profit. It’s undoubtedly part of a marketing strategy to use inflated, inaccurate numbers to sell a false dream to players unfamiliar with how the game works but that is arguably predatory and many parts of the industry - players, websites, poker news outlets and poker sites - actively take part in the deception.
Overall, I think that poker content and marketing remains too exclusionary. We need to remind people of how fun the game is instead of beating them over the head with GTO frequencies and solver outputs. Many people just want to be their own boss, work from the comfort of their own home, and do something they love that allows you to live comfortably. Maybe next year I’ll put that on a t-shirt.

Ray Wheatley:

It’s a very strange market and, as time goes by, I find that I am watching less and less content. Vlogs are painful and reels are not much better. Influencers are mostly awful players! Between AI and RTA, poker is in a strange place online. I think the key is promoting satellites and marketing to the recreational market. I have seen the deterioration of the Irish Poker Tour to turbo, crap-shoot structures. Internationally, there is great choice out there in events but maybe there is too much choice and the promoters are eating each other's lunch.

Kenny Hallaert:

I don’t think that we are going the right direction in terms of social media but maybe I am getting too old for this. I’m not sure what part is missing in general.

Positives and Negatives

From those polled, five found positives and negatives in how the game has been marketed in the past twelve months. However, they were anything but fence-sitters and they all gave in-depth answers. This is how they articulated their views:

Nick Walsh:

Yes and No, but it would seem that some of what I would consider “GOOD FOR POKER CONTENT” doesn't always land as well as I would have expected. I think there is TONS of great stuff getting made and not finding a big enough audience and I think there is some really “bad content” that's getting seen very widely (but does that make it “good content” and I'm just a fish? 😄). I would love more long form story telling about prominent figures à la "PokerStars Stories" ("I am Nanonoko" / "Talonchick") of old to try and inspire a new generation of players to join the fray!

David Docherty:

I think some individual content creators are doing excellent work - I'm thinking the likes of Liam Hind, Barry Carter, Marle Spragg and Caitlin Comesky - but the one thing those four all have in common is light-hearted short-form comedy. It's good quality and it's really easy to consume. On the other hand, I think other creators are potentially slipping into cookie-cutter templates that are removing personality and uniqueness from their content.
I'm speaking mainly about live trip vloggers in this regard - it seems like an over-saturated area. There's only so many live 5/10 hand histories or thinly-veiled Cyprus adverts a person can watch. On the marketing front, I think all the major operators have struggled to differing degrees. They really could do with tracking down the guy who used to run the BetfairPoker twitter account and giving him all the keys.

Kyna England:

Honestly, I don't really care. Not everything is going to resonate with everyone. I think a lot of the marketing done around the ClubGold promotions was fun. They are creating new layers to the game so I appreciate that. I think people oftentimes confuse social media presence with marketing and they don't always go hand in hand. People can spit fire on a company’s decision and we all know that they are still going to go play their events.

Ian Simpson:

There’s some great content out there, and there’s some utter garbage. Are we counting the feuds (fake or not) on social media as content? Because they’re designed to get clicks, right? That shit is certainly not putting our best foot forward. It might hit some social media manager’s KPI, but I don’t know how many players it is actually bringing into the game. We often go viral for all the wrong reasons but thankfully, we had some shining moments this year - the WSOP Main Event saw Leo Margets, Kenny Hallaert and Michael Mizrachi make the final table, all of which were great for poker’s image for a variety of reasons. Liv Boeree came back to our game, immediately got a huge score and donated a big chunk of it to charity.
We also saw a relatively unknown player BigLi Poker go viral for an outstanding comedy sketch. He has since made some other great content but his River Department sketch had us all creased laughing. Strategy content doesn’t get the clicks that a comedy sketch or a twitter feud gets, so it’s might not look as appealing to a content maker. However, long-term players are typically ones who embrace the strategy of the game, and they’re the ones who are going to generate the most rake for a company in the long run.

Jen Shahade:

I think the poker culture is great for fans of the game because there is so much to choose from, from strategy to entertainment. In particular, the poker world has never been funnier. I was obsessed by Nikki Limo’s hand chart video, for example. The live shows hosted by Joe Stapleton and Caitlin Comesky at PokerStars stops have been really great examples of how fun the tour can be.
As for how to do better, I’d like to see more mainstream coverage of poker events that isn’t cheating scandals. We get blamed for scandals that have nothing to do with anyone in the actual industry, and that really pisses me off! As a silver lining, at least we had Berkey as our spokesperson!
I know legacy media is not as crucial as it once was, but I think in poker it’s really underrated. Legacy media brings prestige and legitimacy, two things that poker craves, and deserves, in my opinion. Maria Ho, Maria Konnikova, Nate Silver, Doug Polk, Phil Hellmuth and Jenny Just are just a few examples of people who are doing so much to get us in front of mainstream audiences. Xuan Liu also made a fantastic push for this in 2025. And I’m sure I’m missing people! And yet, I think we can do even more and I’m hungry to contribute more in this area as well.

Five Players Both Positive and Hopeful

Five players from my panel of luminaries were overwhelmingly positive in their review of poker marketing in 2025 and hopefully for the future. Here are their answers:

Barry Carter:

I actually get excited by all sorts of poker content. The game is quite atomized these days which is bad for growth but good for poker nerds like me. We do need ways to find new audiences but I’ve accepted that we likely will never have another boom. I’m very happy to watch the Tritons, the Spraggys, the Caitlyn Comeskys and Nikki Limos, even the naughty Club WPT Golds. Having said that, I do think poker content and marketing has a view bot/fake follower problem to which we are only just waking up. I expect that to be a big talking point in 2026.

Andreas Mavromoustakis:

I really like some poker podcasts and some streamers like Daniel Petersen. In terms of marketing, I don't feel like it's my job to judge but I feel like poker is becoming bigger day by day and it will continue that way. However, I think that a lot of sites are trying to show only the winner's perspective, while ignoring that the vast majority of players are unsuccessful, struggling and losing money. I think that people should be aware that it's a very small percentage that lives the successful poker player life.

Tobias Leknes:

This feels like a somewhat leading question! Marketing poker and gambling in general will always be hard to get right. More and more regulations are splitting up the online market. That being said there are tons of wonderful and creative souls out there, and I think we're seeing poker keeping up with the newest trends and ways to keep it interesting in the modern age. On a more personal note, I truly enjoy well-written articles, for example, being able to read Sam Greenwood’s insights through “Punt of the Day” is truly remarkable.

Padraig O’Neill:

It's been a fun few weeks on the sidelines watching the titans of poker marketing get into social media arguments. I’ve produced well over 100 videos this year but I do consider myself a newbie learning that game. There is some great content out there for learning the game and also fun short-form videos. However, marketing the game as a fun pastime for people that may not want to chase the poker dream does seem to be lacking at times. It's a beautiful game to play once a week.

Nikki Limo:

I really loved our WPT Gold Rush promotion, as controversial as it ended up being, and I hope we continue to take big swings like that. Honestly, I think poker marketing is going the right direction. I think everyone has to go through that experimental phase to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s how growth happens and I’m just really happy to see the poker world finally start experimenting with new ideas, formats and styles. There was a lot of creativity in 2025 and I personally think that poker is supposed to be fun. The less seriously we take ourselves the better — These answers were not written by AI.

Little Bit of Everything

In conclusion, poker’s marketeers have a difficult job trying to figure out how to entice new customers and, in good faith, plenty of money has been spent down the years trying to draw in people that ultimately could not be convinced to give poker a go. I don’t think that poker operators should be overly criticised when a marketing campaign flops but I do think that there is an onus on them to hit all the demographics.

Poker players are not a monolith. They are an eclectic group of people, perhaps united by a couple of common traits but, for the most part, diverse in their backgrounds, preferences and sensibilities. In the almost twenty years that I have been involved with the game, I have seen operators go all-in on one demographic, usually men aged 25-35. That is obviously a key demographic but catering to that group often ostracizes others. The people who sell the game need to understand that and try to shine a spotlight on all aspects of the poker world.

I call this ‘the little bit of everything’ approach to marketing. March to the beat of different drums and leave no stone unturned. It is challenging, time-consuming and more complicated to split your marketing budget across a multiplicity of groups but when your customer defies categorization, you must do that to widen the net as much as possible.

David is a professional poker player, writer and commentator. He has written over 750 blogs and articles on poker; including news, opinion and strategy. He is the producer and host of the 3-time GPI Global Poker Award winning podcast ‘The Chip Race.’ In 2025, he was nominated for the GPI Global Poker Award for journalism. David was a brand ambassador for Unibet Poker from 2017 until 2025. He is currently a brand ambassador for WPT Global.