For many months now, online poker players have watched as top online poker sites have shifted from grinders and high stakes gaming to caring more about recreational gamers. Years ago, when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, the poker industry saw a boom in online poker game play. Any and everyone wanted to try online poker and see if they could become a professional.
Online poker sites then began to set up online poker teams with professionals who represented the brands during live as well as online gaming. These pros were paid well and helped the online poker site to bring in recreational players as well as grinders who worked night and day to earn cash to start an online poker career.
However, 2015 seemed to be the year that the online poker rooms decided to shift to recreational players. Over the past few years, many sites have done away with their pro teams, while other sites have worked to focus their gaming environment to recreational players while doing away with the reward programs and incentives previously offered by the site.
888poker has joined the fray and started to offer recreational options rather than focus on the pro gamer. To try and bring in recreational players, 888 has started a new advertising campaign in the United Kingdom to target such players. Instead of showing an advertisement with calculating pros, the new campaign is more fun and exciting.
Titled Live the Game, the new ad was created to show how true poker players see the game reflected in everything they do, essentially how they see the world. Sivan Finn, the PR and Marketing Director for 888, says it could be during a dance-off, chilling on vacation or even taking a dive into the pool, it all can relate to line poker gaming. These players live and breathe the game.
There are three commercials currently running for 888 in the UK. In each commercial, a group of three friends are highlighted playing the game of poker in some situation. One commercial shows the friends playing at a pool while the other shows a bar by the beach and yet another shows a dinner club with jazz music. Each is silly and shows the game in an exciting way.
Each commercial was not created to show how you can make a career out of playing poker. They were created to show that poker players can have fun playing the game no matter the situation. The commercials focus on poker being a game and how it can be fun, having a contest between other players.
Currently, 888 offers the second largest online poker room in the world. This is based on the information found at PokerScout, a tracker of online poker statistics. The site sees an average of 2,300 cash game players on a seven day basis which is quite astounding if you consider the statistics of other top brands who see only a few hundred players with the same values.
PokerStars holds the top spot and 888 is in no position to overtake the brand. However both online poker brands are focusing more on recreational players which will help to increase the amount of traffic both sites see on a regular basis.
Such advertisements like the new one launched by 888 are just a small example as to how the online poker rooms are using different methods to show they are recreational in nature rather than catering to sharks who take advantage of the regular player. It will be interesting to see what other measures are taken by 888 and other online poker rooms to stress the recreational environment being created in today’s online poker landscape.