Retaining the staff of a live poker organisation: continuity
Between one stop and the next, your team disappears. The dealer you trained goes back to doing something else, the floor who knew your procedures takes the first trip that comes along, and at the next stop you start over: you look, you try, you explain it all again. It is not a recruitment problem. […]
Promoting a poker tournament: the communication plan
The communication of a poker club is, in the vast majority of cases, improvised: people start talking about the stop when the date is close, and stop the day after. In this model nothing is improvised: twelve months are planned, and every stop of the year sits inside a single plan. Why team events never […]
Running the social media of a poker club without getting hurt
You have the people, you know who does what and you know how the profits are shared. What is missing is the thing that holds the rest together the moment somebody speaks in your name: the written rules. Why you need written rules when everyone speaks In an organisation where every unit takes part in […]
Poker skills in Texas Hold’em, online and live
For the institutions the element that keeps poker among gambling games is one only: the impossibility, for every player involved, of using their own skills to govern the outcome of a game. Demonstrating the opposite is the indispensable prerequisite for Texas Hold’em tournaments to be recognised as a sporting activity under the criteria of the […]
Paying poker tournament staff with the Social Enterprise
You have a horizontal structure and you know who does what. What remains is the question that decides whether it holds: what do you pay the people who work in it with — and why should they stay with you instead of going to somebody else’s tournament. Engagement is not only about the audience When […]
The staff of a poker tournament: who does what
You have decided what to replace the pyramid with. What remains is the practical question, the one that hits you the day you have to put a team together: who do you actually need, and what does each of them do. A manager who takes barriers down instead of putting them up The structure that […]
Is Texas Hold’em poker a sport or gambling?
If you play live Texas Hold’em poker, or if you run the tournaments, you have been asked the question a hundred times: is it a sport or is it gambling? And almost every time you have answered that it is a matter of skill, and almost every time whoever asked was not convinced. They are […]
Communities of practice: how a poker club is organised
That a vertical structure does not hold up you have already seen. The real question is what you replace it with — and the answer has a name, it is not a recent invention, and in live poker it works better than anywhere else. The four founding elements of a community of practice Étienne Wenger. […]
What the Skill Poker Index are
The Skill Poker Index are the percentage indicators that determine the partial distribution of the pot in relation to the skills involved in a given phase of the spot. They intervene solely and exclusively in the all-in phases preceding the river, and they touch nothing else in the tournament. Of the tournament, in fact, they […]
Why live poker is still not regulated
A live Texas Hold’em poker tournament, in Italy, takes place if the police chief authorises it. Not a national law, not an industry regulation: the police chief of the province. That is why in Piedmont people play and in Friuli-Venezia Giulia they do not, with the very same tournament format. The norm the police chief […]