For three hours on Thursday afternoon, several hundred players around the world gathered in Twitch chat to play poker with a world champion, a comedian, and a guy who works for Run It Up. You know, just your average home game.
Chat Plays Poker launched at noon Pacific Time yesterday on the PokerStars Twitch channel. The $1/$1 capped no-limit hold’em game featured a lineup of Chris Moneymaker, Joe Stapleton, and Jesse Fullen. Around 1,500 viewers watched, with several hundred of them voting on what actions to take through the Twitch client. All the while Run It Up mastermind Jason Somerville played host, giving Chat its options on every hand and commenting on its decisions in real time.
When we spoke with Somerville at the Run It Up House this summer, he told us he’d been looking for ways to make live streamed poker more interactive, more engaging, and more entertaining. “If you watch a lot of other live stream poker games, it’s usually stiff, often with no player audio, often with no one that understands Twitch,” Somerville told us. “We are Twitch, we live and breathe Twitch, particularly Twitch poker. So we know what the fans want.”
He ain’t lying.
The smack-talk from the other players at the table was heavy from the very beginning, especially from Moneymaker. Stapes caught an earful on the very first hand.
Want to get in on some of that sweet Chat Plays Poker action yourself? The show returns to the PokerStars Twitch channel on Friday, October 4!
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