EPT Monte Carlo: Joe Stapleton looks back on his sensational time with PokerStars
It will be a bittersweet moment for poker fans on Sunday when the EPT Monte Carlo Main Event winner is crowned. While one player will be beginning their new life as an EPT champion, the man handing over the trophy will be doing so for the final time.
Yes, it’s unfortunately true. The much-loved PokerStars commentator Joe Stapleton is calling the EPT action for the final time in Monte Carlo. It will bring to an end a near 17-year association with the Red Spade, during which Stapes has made countless friends and fans across the world and has become, alongside his “work wife” James Hartigan, the voice of PokerStars.
Stapleton departs “mutually and amicably”, adding that “PokerStars has my eternal gratitude”. The short version is that Stapes has recently got engaged, is planning a wedding, and life on the road rapidly becomes a lot less appealing when thoughts are forever thousands of miles away.
Paying tribute in particular to Hartigan and Francine Watson, Associate Director of Creative and Content at PokerStars, Stapleton said: “I have achieved far more in life than I could have ever imagined, and it would not have been possible without the faith and support of the super talented people I’ve had the pleasure of working with all these years.”
Joe Stapleton’s long association with PokerStars is coming to its end
Knowing it will soon be time to bid farewell to Stapes, PokerStars Blog requested the chance to wring one last piece of content out of one of our best friends and most enthusiastic supporters. We asked Stapes to look back on the previous decade and a half and pick out some highlights from a hectic time.
He estimated that PokerStars has taken him to close to 20 countries. It has sent him to hotel suites in Monte Carlo and industrial estates in Edinburgh. It has had him swilling cocktails with A-listers in the Caribbean and downing full English breakfasts blended into smoothies.
And that’s not even the half of it.
THE BIG GAME AND THE RETURN OF THE BIG GAME
Stapleton commentated on two seasons of The Big Game in 2010-2011, alongside Chris Rose and then Scott Huff, with Amanda Leatherman hosting. The show was not recommissioned after poker’s Black Friday, but it was resurrected in 2024, with Stapleton now alongside James Hartigan.
Stapleton says that after the huge disappointment of the show’s demise, owing to factors outside of everyone’s control, its return more than a decade later was huge.
“PokerStars took a big chance on me for The Big Game. From what I understand, they all but hired somebody else and Daniel Negreanu and John Caldwell [former PokerStars executive] and Barry Greenstein all stamped their feet and said, ‘You’re making a mistake and you gotta hire this kid.’
And after the first season, Daniel either tweeted or said out loud, ‘I love being right.’
That that show would have been a hit with or without me. But luckily it was with me. And it was also the start of me getting partnered with people who are far more experienced and more talented than me, and those people stuck up for me and believed in me.
Chris Rose was incredibly supportive and very patient with me as someone who had never done broadcasting before. And then after the loss of that show because of Black Friday, that’s when Francine [Watson] decided that she was going to take me on and that was a huge risk for her too.
The return of the Big Game was one of Stapleton’s happiest moments
When it came back 12 years later, it was one of the most gratifying and happiest moments of my life. Getting to do The Big Game again. And everyone really treated it like it was my show. I was one of only two people on the entire production that had worked on both versions of it. So it was a really surreal experience to not only have it come back, but to have such a big say and to be an executive producer on it. It was kind of a dream come true. A nice full circle moment.
When I came back, I really felt confident and like I knew what I was doing at that point. And it was really cool to get a chance to do it again, having acquired all the skills I was lacking in the beginning.”
Post-script: The good news for Big Game fans is that another 10-episode season is already in the can. It will air on PokerStars YouTube channel, featuring the voice of Joe Stapleton, later this year.
EPT SKITS SHOWCASE STAPES THE COMEDIAN
Having hit it off immediately as a commentating duo during broadcasts of the North American Poker Tour (NAPT), James Hartigan and Stapes continued their partnership on the European Poker Tour. It meant Stapleton, born and raised in upstate New York, was now regularly heading across the world to places like Deauville, Prague, Barcelona, London, Malta and Monaco, as the EPT pioneered live streaming from its flagship events.
He also got the chance to learn his trade from the consummate professional, Hartigan. Hartigan began his career in radio and hosted shows on a number of stations in the UK. He transitioned to poker and began fronting the EPT TV shows, alongside a succession of poker experts and co-commentators. But he and Stapes found a unique chemistry. Stapleton continues to offer huge amounts of credit to Hartigan for helping with his career.
Stapes and James Hartigan, right, formed a close friendship and an incredible bond in the commentary booth
Initial EPT broadcasts were “cards down” — i.e., viewers and commentators could not see a player’s holding unless the hand went to showdown — meaning there was a huge burden on the announcers to keep things interesting for many long hours. Hartigan and Stapes gradually developed various memes and in-jokes to keep viewers engaged, while also keeping the streams interactive and responding to viewers comments.
The EPT action was also still latterly edited and packaged into TV shows, broadcast across the world. Stapleton wrote and starred in more than 60 30-second skits to feature in these broadcasts. It was hugely demanding, but ultimately incredible rewarding too.
He says: “The skits weren’t poker related. They were poker adjacent at best. And again, Francine took a real shot at letting us do that, since anything that’s not poker tends to annoy the audience. But some of them actually worked! Some of them were actually quite funny.
And it’s the only way that I got to experience the cities that we were in because our schedules are so demanding that I didn’t have time for tourism virtually any of the trips that we went on. But we went to the Gaudi Museum, we went to Sagrada Familia and we went to the Picasso Museum and Barcelona Zoo to shoot these skits. That’s the only way I got to see these tourist attractions. When we were in Monte Carlo, I got to see the yachts and I got to see the F1 track because we were shooting the skit.
It was beneficial to me to get to do some pure comedy, not poker related, to get to write and direct. We had to write these things with no additional parts, no actors, very few props. They all had to be self-contained in these locations, had to be TV friendly, had to be under a minute. There was quite the constraints on them.
Stapleton paid tribute in particular to James Hartigan, left, and Francine Watson
I think I probably wrote close to 60 of them over the years. Occasionally some of the producers would come to me with some ideas and many of them got used because it was hard coming up with stuff, especially if we were at a venue for a second or third time. But I was cranking these things out. As someone who has always felt sort of on the outskirts of the entertainment industry, getting to do scripted comedic stuff was just phenomenal.
And some of them were actually good. Some of them were terrible, but some of them were actually kind of funny.”
TEAM PROS GET WICKED IN CHALLENGE STAPES
Filling the dead air produced by tournament breaks during live poker streams has always caused a headache for broadcast directors. But for a period during the early days of what was once known as EPT Live, they turned to their trusty stooge Stapes for a novel way to fill the vacuum.
“Challenge Stapes” was a series of extended skits in which a viewer vote would send Stapleton off on a random adventure in the EPT host city, often accompanied by a member of Team PokerStars Pro. The challenges became more and more extreme and included, among other things, Jason Mercier and Stapleton feeding the ingredients of a full English breakfast into a blender which Stapes then drank; Chris Moneymaker leading a trio of Team Pros hurling rotten vegetables at Stapes when a bit of stand-up fell flat; or, most painfully of all, Fatima Moreira de Melo and Leo Margets ripping Stapes’ chest and back hair out when he failed to remember song lyrics correctly.
A painful memory from the Challenge Stapes series
Many of these episodes remain on Daily Motion for you to remember in all their violent glory. Stapleton, remarkably, has a rose-tinted view of it all.
He says: “It’s funny that in hindsight I have nothing but good memories of Challenge Stapes, but when I really think about it, it was so much pressure on me.
We would come up with these three challenges and the audience would vote on one, and I would more or less come up with what the challenges are. And they usually involved me being embarrassed in one way or another.
But I have really great memories of doing the English breakfast smoothie in London with Jason Mercier. And in Malta we did like an Impractical Jokers kind of thing where Fatima Moreira de Melo and Griffin Benger were in my ear, forcing me to do embarrassing things. We did stand up comedy in the Bahamas where we gave three Team Pros a crate of tomatoes that they could throw at me if they didn’t like my jokes. In Monaco, I had to dress up like a princess and sell people kisses, charge people for photos, maybe.
I sold sand on the beach in Barcelona. And that one was lucky because we ran into ElkY and I sold him some and I completed the challenge. I ended up eating sand in that one, which is one of my big regrets.
My big regret from the English breakfast one was that at the very end I tried to stuff a napkin in the top. I was like, look, you’re gonna need a napkin with your English breakfast. And the crew was like, no, do not do that. So they had me take the napkin out, but then I topped it off with some HP sauce. And my biggest regret was putting the entire bottle in.
The smoothie wasn’t that bad. It’s all stuff you might eat in a breakfast, right? It was like eggs and mushrooms and beans or whatever. But you would never have an entire bottle of HP sauce with your English breakfast, let alone all in one go. It was actually not that difficult to do, but the HP sauce really made it tough.
Down the hatch: Stapes downs the full English breakfast smoothie
We’d have to shoot these things at seven in the morning for the most part. And I would look at the crew and they’d be like, ‘We got to get up at 6 a.m. to come meet you to do this? This better be funny.’ I’ve talked to the crew about it since, and they said they never felt that way. But that’s what it felt like.
They actually said they miss doing that kind of stuff so much. There’s one camera guy named Liam. I’m going to miss him a lot. I knew if he was laughing then what I was doing was funny. He was like my barometer.”
TRADING JOKES WITH A COMEDY LEGEND
Despite spending months of the year travelling for poker, Stapleton also sustained a burgeoning career as a stand-up comedian during his years with PokerStars. As his reputation grew, he crossed paths with numerous familiar names in the world of comedy, none more so than the American titan Norm Macdonald.
To Stapleton’s obvious delight, Macdonald loved poker and was already a big fan of Stapes’ work, allowing the pair to bond over their shared passions. When PokerStars announced the PokerStars Players Championship (PSPC) in 2019, Stapes was able to offer Macdonald an exclusive Platinum Pass to play in the $25,000 buy-in event. And Stapleton would arrange a comedy show in the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas at which they could both appear.
Macdonald, who had the chops and the status to sell out the biggest comedy theatres across the US, therefore stepped on stage at the Atlantis comedy club in front of a thrilled gathering of poker players and guests. The night is still talked about as one of the biggest highlights in recent poker memory.
Norm Macdonald played an exclusive show at the PSPC in 2019
But it was only part of the story for Macdonald and Stapleton.
Stapes recalls: “That was a huge, huge moment in my career to be able to go to Norm, offer him a Platinum Pass, have him headline the show, get to open, get to hang out with Norm. That’s what launched me.
I had met Norm before that because it turns out he was a fan, but it was after that that he said, ‘Hey, I think I want to take you on the road with me.’ And then I got to travel with a legend for a year and a half. I will dine out on that for the rest of my life. The fact that, if I go nowhere else in comedy, ever the arguably greatest comedian who ever lived asked me to go on the road with him. We wrote jokes for each other. We gave each other notes. I knew more about that guy than most people ever will.
Obviously I thought he was going to be with us a lot longer than he was, or else I probably would have forced him to spend more time with me towards the end. [Macdonald died of cancer in September 2021.]
The line-up in full (l-r): Ben Ludlow, Joe Stapleton, Norm Macdonald, Clayton Fletcher.
The show at the PCA was an absolutely massive moment. I also got to hire my friend Clayton Fletcher to perform on that show as well. Ben Ludlow was on the show. Clayton gave me my first ever stage time in New York City. He’s always been really supportive. So to be able to throw him on that bill as well was really special for me. To be able to share that moment with a couple of really good friends of mine.”
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From everyone at PokerStars Blog, thanks for everything Joe! Can’t wait to see what’s next. We’re going to miss you.
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