State of the Felt --- Jonno Pittock Part II

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 features part II of the interview with Crown Casino Director of Tournament Operations Jonno Pittock. He talks about how a sports culture and the grassroots growth of poker pub leagues have further grown Australian poker in recent years.

Ryan Lucchesi: With the Australian Open going on at the same time as the Aussie Millions and all of the excitement it creates, along with the abundance of sporting venues in this city, you see how important sport is to the culture here. Do you think that because everyone plays sports and they’re competitive that that’s really transferred over to the game of poker?

Jonno Pittock: Absolutely, you’ve hit it on the head. Melbourne itself is almost like a huge sports precinct. The MCG (Melbourne Cricket Grounds) holds 120,000; we’ve got the Telstra Dome that holds 50,000-60,000, and we’ve got a couple of other venues like the Rod Laver Arena that can hold 40,000 and things like that. So, we’ve got all of these sporting venues that would be the marquee venue in any other city, and we’ve got three or four of them here. So, you’re right, it’s embedded into the culture of the Australian mindset. Having the chance for an amateur to sit down and play and potentially be a professional is really appealing to the market.

RL: The other thing you notice is that a lot of the professional athletes want to jump in and compete with the poker players. Do you see a lot of that at Crown Casino?

JP: We get a lot of sports guys in here, either retired sportsmen who are looking for something to keep up their competitive edge, or even guys when they are injured. They’ll come in when they’re out of the game for three or four weeks for an injury. They’ll come in here to play four nights out of the week just to keep their mind right. They’re ultra competitive, they just want to win.

RL: How have the pub leagues contributed to the growth of poker here and provided a system that feeds the casino tables with players?

JP: It was in 2005 that a couple of guys that we know from years ago that are actually casino employees up in Sydney...they started up an amateur poker league in Sydney, it’s called the Australian Poker League. So, they would approach the pubs and say, we’re going to bring some players to your venue…the venue gets the benefit of the increased spending on the slot machines. Australia actually has a really big slot market. There are more slot machines per capita in Australia than any other country in the world. Pretty much every pub now, if they have a gaming license, they have a dozen slot machines, so that is where all of their revenue comes from. Australians like to gamble. We get the day off every year in November for the Melbourne Cup [horse race]. So you get out of school or work and you get the day off and you go and watch it at somebody’s house and everybody bets.

It’s embedded into the culture. What happened with the pub market is that all of a sudden it went bang. They launched this league and three to four months later there were 200 to 300 pubs in Sydney that had all of this poker. About six months after that. they launched into the Victorian market. At that stage, we thought is this going to hurt our business. Because obviously the more poker that’s around the more options people have. Being a monopolized casino, that’s going to take business out of our pocket. We kind of made a strategic play at that point that we weren’t going to try to compete with these guys, because we saw it as a breeding ground for real-money players, and it’s perfect now. Because our brand is so strong in the region, we have a lot of affiliations with these guys. We do work with the APL and the National Poker League, and there are a lot of smaller providers. So, they’ll do things like they’ll run freeroll qualifiers into our events like the Aussie Millions…What they do is they basically breed all of these players, and we sort of took the attitude that a high tide floats all boats, so the more players who are coming into the game, the better off it is going to be for the entire industry.

It has been out of control, because what it actually has done is that it has turned every little pub into a potential poker room. Some of these guys have got five to six tables, and some of them have more like 10 to 20, and they run 200-player events every week. These guys don’t have to get into their car and drive all the way into the city, they can go into their local pub, and eventually they get a taste for the game and they learn they want to play for more. Because of the work we have put in to build this room up to what it is, when they walk in here, it’s like wow…It’s like a breeding ground where the natural transition is to come in and play for real money, and we support it as much as we can.

RL: What do you think the future of poker is at Crown Casino and in Australia, in general?

JP: It’s interesting; we’re going to continue to grow the market as much as we can. The future for us is that we’re going to do more marquee events. We’re probably going to look to do a second marquee event outside of the Aussie Millions. Get some more film distribution and get some more local film distribution, as well. PokerStars is really pushing into the region with the APPT [Asia Pacific Poker Tour] and the ANZPT [Australia New Zealand Poker Tour], so it will be interesting to see how that works out…we’ll probably join with a leg of that tour, depending on what happens with other things that we’re doing.

As far as growing the market goes, we're still getting year-over-year growth with volume numbers. If you look at the Aussie Millions, while the main event numbers decreased, all of the other numbers are huge. It’s almost as if the players are down-shifting from the $10K events, and we’ve noticed that even throughout the course of the year. Our Melbourne Poker Championships this year had 668 entrants, and that was almost 50 percent year-over-year growth, and our Victorian Poker Championships was similar. We’ll strengthen up our championship market, and we have a Crown player of the year race that we’re running. We do a lot more online stuff now, as well; we’ve got channels on YouTube and Facebook. Grassroots is where it’s at, and these pub players are our grassroots market, and we want to do everything we can to ease the transition for these guys from their local pub into this casino environment.

As far as Australian poker goes, it’s interesting. We weren’t the first poker room in Australia. Adelaide used to run the Australian Poker Championships in the early eighties and things like that, so when they were scaling their rooms back and closing them in the late nineties, we were trying to push the product and grow. So, we’re at a stage now where we can help the whole industry boom, and we work with a lot of people, even though they’re our competitors. We work with each and we cross-promote our brands; we take that attitude that a high tide floats all boats. Our market position is very strong, but at the same time, we understand the better the thing is for the game, the better it is going to be for us, as well. We know the facilities that we’ve got, and we trust in what we do, so we’re going to maintain at the forefront. It’s about bringing everyone else up with us.

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