In this episode of Chats with Tats, poker pro Jason Somerville describes his “absolutely insane” year and how he took a break from being a Twitch superstar to play the World Series of Poker.
Jason Somerville is wearing too many hats recently.
He is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, a member of Team PokerStars, a poker commentator, and a Twitch superstar via his Run It Up show.
“Usually I just wear the one, you know, but hey, once in a while we make exceptions,” Somerville told CalvinAyre.com. “It’s been an amazing, funs summer, and it’s, you know, kind of crazy that it’s already wrapping up. But it’s been awesome.”
The 27-year-old has had a pretty eventful year. After parting ways with Ultimate Poker in 2014, Somerville went on to join PokerStars last March and announced his plans to play for 70 consecutive days, which he will record live on Twitch.
“This last year has been absolutely insane. A year ago today, I was an Ultimate Poker pro (and) I was still making YouTube videos for Run It Up, and you know, in the last six months, things have changed a lot,” Somerville said. “I started on Twitch and (on) Oct. 1, I started officially streaming with Twitch as a partner and started my season March 1 also on Twitch, where I did 78 days in a row on Twitch for six-and-half hours a day, so I did about 500 hours of content in two and half months.”
In fact, things had been so hectic for him that he took a break to play the World Series of Poker 2015.
“I played the World Series, which is almost like a break. It wasn’t even like I came to work. I came to take, like, my downtime, and so now I’m just getting ready to get back to Twitch and start streaming again for another few months at least,” Somerville said.
The poker pro also talked about his daily struggles with streaming.
“Besides the routine, one of the things I found toughest was, I’m the kind of guy where like, if I’m feeling a certain way, I like to adjust,” Somerville said. “There’s couple of times when I’m not feeling good, but I started to stream anyway. There was one day where I was pretty sure I was gonna puke on screen, but if (Daniel) Negreanu can pee on screen then I puke on screen, so what’s the big deal?”
Pushing through the tough days has paid off well for Somerville. To date, Run It Up has 3 million unique people watching the show in addition to 7.2 million non-unique return total visits and 200 million minutes watched across the season.
“(It’s also) the first time we grow 20,000 people. Twenty thousand people is like a stadium full of people live. I mean, it’s not of course the same feeling when you’re watching online, it’s just me with a webcam, but the first time I did it, I was a little bit more nervous. I was like, ‘Holy wow, there’s like 25,000 people watching me right now.’ But as it starts happening, you get more used to it, you get more comfortable in it. You get more experience, then you start saying, well what can I do to make this better? How can I improve? And that’s how I approached it,” Somerville said.
