The Future of the WSOP following Black Friday

Many within the poker industry are raising concerns that the effects of Black Friday will reach far beyond the online poker industry and might have adverse effects on land-based poker tournaments including some of the biggest and best known tournaments.

A majority of land-based poker tournaments are sponsored by the online poker room industry. Their sponsorship and sometimes even full funding of these tournaments ensures these tournaments can offer huge prizes and drum up the appeal of the tournaments.

Many of these tournaments are televised which provides the online poker rooms the advertising they need. Now with the US poker market losing three of the biggest poker rooms that were available to US players; Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and PokerStars, there is no point in these poker rooms advertising to US players.

The biggest concern is regarding the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and the World Poker Tour (WPT) that offer multi-million prize pools with great help from sponsorship.

These tournaments are the most popular and viewed in the world and there is a big risk that they would lose some of their appeal without sponsorship from the big poker rooms.

Another issue is the immediate disassociation, following Black Friday, of companies like ESPN that withdrew all its poker-related advertising and poker programming from its schedule. It still plans on broadcasting the WSOP this year but no one knows what will happen with subsequent poker events.