The online multi-table tournament legend, Bryan Paris, has signed for the Asian facing online poker room, Natural8, as a member of Team Hot and immediately wins a tournament at his new home.
A poker player signs for a significant online poker room, and amid the congratulatory messages come the words, “I deserved it after all this hard work.”
But how do you define “hard work” in poker?
In February, Bryan Paris became the second player behind Chris Moorman to earn $10m playing online multi-tab
le tournaments (MTTs). You don’t hit that number while scrubbing potatoes in the back of your chip shop.
It takes “hard work.”
But that’s not the “hard work” that earned Bryan Paris his sponsorship deal this week. Paris caught the eye of Natural8 because of his tribe. And if you have tried to build a tribe you know how much “hard work” it takes.
Undeniably, Paris is one of the finest specimens of his generation. In addition to his $10.3m online winnings, the Menlo Park native has also won over $700,000 playing live, and this week was giving up his free time to commentate on the final table of the WPTDeepStacks Main Event in Marrakech.
But it’s the work he has put into his Twitch stream that has seen him skate along the iced-up river straight into the arms of the Asian facing online poker room. Paris has over 22,000 followers, and you don’t accrue those sorts of numbers without the ability to express empathy, humility, and tension. These three essential qualities lead to an overarching four quality – trust.
His tribe watch him because they trust him and that’s a quality that any company wants to see from a perspective coffee machine hangout.
The new face of online poker, look out world pic.twitter.com/eZ0Yme7UIU
— gN Bryan Paris (@bparispoker) October 24, 2017
Paris joins Xuan Liu, Kitty Kuo, Kosei Ichinose, Adrian Attenborough, Dong Kim, and Henri Buehler as part of Natural8’s Team Hot. Paris is currently in Rozvadov, bracelet hunting in the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE). Paris has never been beyond 11th place in a WSOP event so, he will have his eyes on that mark.
And the 31-year-old wasted no time getting comfortable in his new role winning an event on his first day on the site, which, incidentally, allows players to sell action directly from the platform without the need for a third party.
Revolutionary.
