The Rise of Twitch Poker

Twitch has become a new platform for poker players to gain a potential second income. It allows a player to go from sitting in his room grinding by himself to broadcasting his play to thousands of viewers online. The ability to not have to rely on your poker results for a living is a great commodity for a poker player and streaming is one of the only ways of achieving this.

A Success Story

Twitch Poker Streamer Jaime Staples

Many players have already gone from grinding out the mid stakes MTT’s or Cash games to making an income from Twitch. The main role model for growing an audience is Jaime Staples. Jaime went from streaming to under 10 viewers on his first stream in early 2015 to regularly streaming to thousands of viewers every day. In this time he has shipped the Big $109 on Pokerstars twice! For around $30k collectively, and gained Pokerstars sponsorship from his popularity on Twitch. It has opened a lot of doors in Jaime’s life with opportunity's like EPT commentary, Team Online meet up's etc. and it’s all because of the dedication he has to streaming and growing his brand.

The Community

If you ask all the streamers on Twitch what they enjoy most, the main response you will get is how much they enjoy the community aspect in their channel. When you load up a stream you will normally see similar names in the chat, this allows people to not only connect with the streamer, but also connect and get to know fellow viewers with similar interests. It is really important to have this as a streamer for a couple reasons, one being it creates a friendly atmosphere in chat for new viewers to get involved, and gives you a consistent viewer count driving your stream forward.

The Pro’s

Not only have you got new and upcoming streamers on Twitch, a lot of proven poker pro’s have hopped on the streaming wagon too. These include Nanonoko, Elky, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, and that’s just a few of the names have have proven to be very popular on Twitch, but there is one pro I wanted to focus on for this segment. He has been at the top of the Twitch listings pretty much from his first stream, he had an extremely popular YouTube series call Run It Up and boasts over $3,500,000 in live cashes. If you don’t know who I'm talking about by now you must have been been living under a rock for the past year. It is of course Jason Somerville, Jason has been the one to really drive poker on Twitch over the past year. He boasted a record concurrent viewership while streaming his WCOOP final table of 37,000 viewers and continues to pull in new viewers every time he streams. The main positive for Jason’s success is the awareness he creates for Twitch Poker. He is often featured on the front page of the site where a lot of guys who haven’t watched or played poker before will possibly try it out for the first time, giving poker some well needed exposure. It’s great for Twitch Poker that these guys are supporting the platform and helping it to grow and let’s hope all the names mentioned continue to stream and keep it going in the right direction.

Get Involved!

It’s really important that Twitch Poker keeps getting fresh guys coming in and trying out streaming, it’s always nice to see new success stories coming through and who knows, the next one could be you! All you have to do is download OBS, load up some tables and start your stream! I hope to see you all in the Twitch listings sometime soon.