The Global Poker League China announced the names of the eight teams that will compete in the debut season. The names of the team managers and players will follow in the coming months.
You won’t find Chinese President, Xi Jinping, playing roulette or craps. Jinping believes gambling is bad news and has vowed to do everything in his power to prevent his people from getting involved.
So when it comes to poker and its route into the largest population in the world, we have to play a very different game. A game that the Global Poker League (GPL) plays to perfection.
Season 1 of the GPL was not about gambling. It was a season that taught the poker community that the desire for competition is enough to turn people on.
As Mike McDonald said in the wake of his team’s victory at the GPL Finals:
“If [the rest of the Nationals] were watching Pascal at a final table playing for ten times these stakes we’d just be sitting there having a good time. Here we were both nervous. We were on the edge of our seats. This really made it about the poker rather than about the money, and I think that’s what the goal of sportifying poker was – is to remind you of right when you were just starting out in Poker, and I think the GPL has accomplished that.”
It’s time to show the Chinese what it means to Sportify poker.
GPL China Announces 8 Team Names
The debut season of GPL China will kick off sometime in 2017. It will operate independently of Season 2 of the GPL, and the two enterprises will differ slightly.
There has been no mention of a draft, but we do know that team managers exclusively select players from the Global Poker Index (GPI) Rankings. Instead, the teams will consist of players from a combination of GPI Rankings, online qualification and celebrities.
GPL China will release the names of the team managers and players in the next two months. But the team names are now known.
– Beijing Great Dragons
– Shanghai Golden Tigers
– Guangzhou Pioneers
– Shenzhen Eagles
– Hangzhou Legends
– Xi’an Warriors
– Chengdu Pandas
– Tianjin Guardians
The matches will take place both live and online, but it’s unclear whether there will be a second cube based somewhere in the vast country. The purpose of the standalone ideology is to focus on pushing poker throughout the Chinese audience as an eSport and mind sport with an emphasis on promoting the league as a team-based skill game.
Matches will be streamed live via a series of media partners through China and the rest of the world. GPL founder, Alex Dreyfus, stipulated on his personal Facebook page that we can expect more strategic partnerships with the GPL in the future.
