The World Poker Tour adds another company to their ‘Official Partner’ list with the blockchain orientated sports betting solution, FansUnite, the latest addition, and Dean Walsh takes down the most recent WPTDeepStacks event in Edmonton.
Sam Cooke said he didn’t know much about history. I don’t know much about blockchain technology.
The World Poker Tour (WPT) has more ‘Official Partners’ than an English Premier League (EPL) football team, and that’s a great thing. Adam Pliska and the crew are the leading lights in the poker industry when it comes to convincing companies to find those extra few bucks hidden in the soles of shoes, and to invest them in our game.
FansUnite Entertainment Inc. is a Vancouver-based sportsbook based on the Ethereum blockchain, and they have spent some of their CAD 4,450,000 Series A funding on a partnership with the live poker tour we all know and love.
The deal will see the FansUnite brand shown during European episodes of WPT Season XV, on Plays of the Week on Heads Up Daily (HUD) on Super Channel in Canada, through social media, and specially arranged contests at WPT live events throughout Europe and Asia.
There is also an exciting opportunity to link up with the former EPL Champions, Leicester City, who also recently partnered with the blockchain focused sports betting unit.
During a recent meeting with The Hendon Mob and Global Poker Index owner, Alex Dreyfus, I asked him if there was a future for blockchain in the poker industry, and the Frenchman told me that he didn’t see how blockchain could support poker to grow, and he is a man who would know.
If this is a straight up sponsorship deal to put money into the coffers of the WPT then as Tony the Tiger used to say, “that’s great”, but if the relationship needs to provide value to WPT’s customers, I can’t see how that’s going to happen, but then again, I can’t see anything when I look at most aspects of blockchain tech.
Take this entry from FansUnite’s whitepaper.
FansUnite is paving the way for a diverse ecosystem of DApps, enabled by the free and decentralized provisioning of sports data. The FansUnite Protocol and the underlying market data offer many use cases, which are only limited by the ingenuity of participating developers and businesses. The FansUnite Ecosystem roadmap will primarily focus on the release of the FansUnite Protocol, and the first decentralized application to be released on the Protocol, the FansUnite Sportsbook. The FansUnite Protocol consists of a library of publicly available smart contracts, developer friendly tools, and a token economy that incentivizes network participation of independent Oracles to provide low-latency and accurate sports data. These three facets of the FansUnite Protocol address shortcomings in the existing sports betting landscape and represent key developments in facilitating a disintermediated betting infrastructure.
I must have been in the back of the class trying to look up Kirsty Brackett’s skirt during this particular lesson.
Dean Walsh Wins WPTDeepStacks Edmonton
Onto something I do understand, and Dean Walsh has taken down the latest WPTDeepStacks event.
The WPT subsidiary recently held a festival at Casino Yellowhead, and Walsh waltzed through a field of 387 entrants to win the Edmonton Fall Main Event for $75,540 and a $3,000 DeepStacks Championships prize package.
Before this victory, Walsh’s previous best score was a tenth place finish in a CAD 2,100 buy-in event at the Canadian Poker Championships, in Edmonton, earning CAD 6,000, so this result was a bolt out of the blue.
“It was a ton of fun,” said Walsh.
Here are the final table results:
Final Table Results
1. Dean Walsh – $75,540
2. Tyler St. Clair – $52,490
3. Jeff Chiasson – $34,030
4. Prabakaran Sivabalasundaram – $22,500
5. Shawn Taghavi – $17,320
6. Darcy Van Wachem – $14,350
7. Kevah Payman – $12,020
8. Erleen Mclean – $9,780
9. Francis Fan – $7,560
