State of the Felt -- Jonno Pittock, Part IThe Director of Poker Room Operations at Crown Casino Talks About the Initial Growth of Australian Poker |
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In State of the Felt, Card Player will periodically bring you insights and opinions from some of the most influential players, tournament and poker organization directors, and other people who influence the poker industry. This is a place where the broad trends and forces that continue to shape the game will have space to live and breathe in open discussion.
This week, the director of tournament operations at the Crown Casino, Jonno Pittock, talks about the forces that began to grow poker in Australia leading up to Joe Hachem's main-event win in the World Series of Poker in 2005, and how that win directly affected the growth of poker in the region.
Ryan Lucchesi: What do you think the three largest factors have been in the growth of Australian poker?
Jonno Pittock: I guess it all started in 2003 when we got the first Aussie Millions as a $10,000 event and we broke a million-dollar prize pool. That got us a lot of publicity. We had a lot of pros who flew in from Europe and the U.S. The Hendon Mob was really big back then, so having those guys hit the shores, and obviously the million-dollar prize pool, gave us something to sell to the media. That sort of kicked off the initial boom. Chronologically, I guess in 2004 Channel 10 started airing the WPT (World Poker Tour). Guys like Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu, these guys are really good for TV and really dramatic. They actually aired it in prime time; it was pretty much after Australian Rules football on Saturday night, which draws the biggest audience, so all of a sudden poker was thrust into the mainstream.
At that stage, we were running “learn to play” campaigns and trying to walk people onto the table and things like that. Overnight, once it came on the TV, everyone started coming in and asking about that game on TV. Obviously, in 2005, Joe Hachem winning really kicked us along, but I think we had the growth sort of coming before that, and I think sort of with what happens in the U.S. is that we tend to be about 18 months to two years behind in things like music and fashions trends and films and things like that. We were still behind that growth, it was really booming in the U.S. back then, and we were seeing it start to boom here, but once Joe won and kicked it off we caught up straight away. It was over a three-year period that spurred it all along, and obviously filming it here and broadcasting it internationally and domestically has been great for it, as well.
RL: Would you compare the effect in Australia of the win of Joe Hachem in 2005 to that of Chris Moneymaker in the United States in 2003?
JP: It was funny, because in 2003 we put more tables in for the Aussie Millions, and then we took them out because obviously it was a peak period so we bump up tables. In 2004, we did the same thing, but we left them in for a little bit longer and then took them out. And then in 2005 we got to 263 for the main event in January, so that was huge. So, we went from having 18-20 tables to having 27 at that stage.
When Joe actually won, it was interesting because they started play on a Friday over there, which went into Saturday morning. So, at about 7 a .m. Saturday morning it’s almost midnight over here on a Saturday night, so you can imagine a poker room that’s got 27 tables filled to the brim with a 100 players waiting on the list. You’ve seen the room, and the bar was busy…what we were doing is we were following Card Player at the time. I was down in the office and following it on the Internet, and every time something would happen, I would go out and give the guys an update. We started that 2-3 days prior, when it looked like Joe was going to start going deep, and when he made the final table, players were coming in, [and] calling each other. By the time it got to heads up…it was a quarter to midnight when I made the announcement that we’ve got a new world champion, and his name is Joe Hachem. The group just went ballistic; it was unbelievable. It was like nothing you’ve ever seen. I can’t explain it, just the emotion in the room. People were crying, and they were on the phone. When he came back, it was just insane.
We sent a limo out to the airport to meet him, and just the media attention he got, it’s almost like overnight he became this instant celebrity over here. He gets mobbed in Vegas, it’s hard to compare the two, but as far as Moneymaker and his comparison go, yeah, I guess Joe did for Australian poker what Moneymaker did to the Internet in the U.S.
RL: It seems that Australians have a lot nationalistic pride when one of their own successes; you see it a lot in the Olympics. Is that what happened with the support for Joe?
JP: Absolutely, it is, and the sport in Australia…and poker is a growing sport, so they really get behind it. Especially when you’ve got an Aussie that does well internationally. There are a lot of rivalries with Australia-New Zealand and Australia-South Africa with the cricket and things like that, and it flows over to everything else.
RL: You said that there were 27 tables in the poker room when Hachem won the WSOP main event. How many are there now?
JP: We had 27 out in 2005, and now, including our 10 PokerPro tables, we’ve got 64 on the floor. We’ve got 49 tables in our poker room, plus our 10 PokerPro tables, and then I’ve got five additional poker tables upstairs, which takes us to 64. We don’t always have to go to full spread; on a regular Friday or Saturday night we’ll have 42-44 open. When we have a major championship, where the room is overflowing, we go to full spread.
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