Poker’s most popular streamer will be returning to the interweb in just a few days. On Thursday, Jason Somerville announced via Twitter that he has signed a new two-year partnership with Twitch to broadcast his daily Run It UP! show.
Somerville has been on hiatus since this spring, but he sounds like he is itching to get back to “dirty basement bliss.” He will once again resume streaming on August 16th. At the beginning of March, after he became sponsored by PokerStars, he set out to stream for at least 70 consecutive days, promising at least four hours of broadcasting each day. He eclipsed that goal, streaming live on the internet for 78 days.
There is no shortage of streamers on Twitch, and the platform has become popular enough where there are plenty of poker streamers, as well. But Somerville got on board early and has created a channel that has a unique appeal amongst poker fans. Somerville is a well-respected poker player, but whereas many poker streamers are fairly bland in their narration, Somerville understands that poker should first and foremost be fun. His goal is to entertain while teaching. He knows that not only do poker fans want to enjoy what they are watching, but there could be poker newcomers tuning in, so he wants to show them what fun the game can be.
He doesn’t get too crazy, though, maintaining the balance between entertaining and still being watchable for the more serious players.
In an interview with Flushdraw.net, Somerville once said:
For me, it’s not about starting with good poker content and then trying to squeak it out to be tolerably watchable. I start out with the approach of saying “Ok, I want this to be enjoyable content that anybody can watch. It’s not just built for a hardcore audience.” I want to make it mainstream, you know? It’s not the majority of my viewership, but there is a section of my audience that didn’t know prior to watching me what a button was or what an ante is. To draw those types of people in you have to be entertaining and have broad content.
On his “jcarverpoker” channel, Jason Somerville has amassed nearly 7.5 million total views and over 105,000 followers.
In a sign that Twitch is more mainstream than ever, Phil Hellmuth made his debut on the site this past Saturday. He has done so every day, playing open face Chinese poker from his study. He does some casual analysis of his games, thinking out loud about his hands at times, but his streams are really more about telling stories and interacting with fans in chat.
As is Hellmuth’s modus operandi, he also drops names during his stream. The highlight of his last few days was arguably Tuesday afternoon, when he called fellow poker player Liv Boeree via FaceTime and included her as part of the show for a few minutes. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently showed her cell phone number to everyone who was watching at the time. Naturally, she received plenty of calls and texts from strangers, but she has been gracious, understanding that it was an accident on Hellmuth’s part. He brought her back later in the stream to apologize (and had Daniel Negreanu on another line) and she laughed it off. Of course, she has told her Twitch followers to come up with a way to get revenge on Hellmuth.
As of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, Hellmuth has over 2,400 live viewers, nearly 94,000 total views, and over 4,700 followers on Twitch.
