Hilarious Poker Commercials of the Past

Advertisements are mind control. An often shady company wants your money and has to persuade you to part with it. How do they persuade you to buy, buy, buy? They tell you how great the product is, but sometimes they resort to outright lies. However, in more recent times they’ve taken to trying to be your friend, tell you a story they heard, share a song they like, or, more often than not, they try to make you laugh.

Plenty of ads fail, sometimes because they make the mistake of trying to put a positive spin on losing, and sometimes because they try to make Tom Dwan seem like a human.

But there’s plenty of good efforts out there. Here are a few of our favorites from the world of Poker Ads.

Sex...

A dirty joke is almost always good for a laugh. A fact that makes an old man lying his way into a drug fuelled blowy a good place to start on a list like this.

Party Poker ran a whole series of adverts like this, including one in which a man must work out the odds that he’s brought home a ladyboy or not. But that sort of filth doesn’t work for everyone. If you are one of those people, then do stay with us. The sophistication and sexual politics, of the humor does rise incrementally from this point.

And if you are too young to get that sort of gag, here’s something a little more appropriate for the child-gamblers and 18th-Century dandies in our readership.

Friendlessness

Party Poker followed the ‘bluff’ series of adverts with their No One To Play With’ series. These leaned on the stereotype of the online gambler as a nerdy, asocial, loner, one who may have spent some time reading The Anarchist’s Cookbook in a basement full of surgical diagrams, and is either on a watchlist/registry or should be.

They also had ads appealing to those of us who are alone because our friends are homophobic, or else still haven’t forgiven Ang Lee for Hulk.

Sasquatch vs. Hellmuth

ESPN went in a very different direction for their WSOP ads. They used Jack Link’s Sasquatch: star of a series of crossover adverts and publicity stunts in which he was mentored by Clay Matthews of the Greenbay Packers, and murdered people, among other shenanigans.

In 2010 they starred Sasquatch in a WSOP ad, in which he and gets two-outered going head-to-head with amateur thespian Phil Hellmuth. The clip comes complete with Lon and Chad doing an excellent impression of their usual real-life schtick.

‘Banned’ Full Tilt Adverts

Then came the time in the long ago days – after companies had just learned about ‘viral’ but had yet to discover ‘clickbait’ – when there was a phase of so called ‘banned’ adverts. Either designed to upset the censors and get themselves banned, or just claiming to have done so, the main life for these advertisements was, and was always meant to be, online.

This series from Full Tilt – their ‘best poker face in the world’ ads – are some of the funniest. You won’t believe what happens to Phil Ivey in number 3!!!

In the first, Eric Seidel meets his daughter’s new boy, hilarity ensues.

In another John Juanda has to deal with elevator shenanigans. Even greater hilarity.

And in the last, Phil Ivey’s marriage is ruined. Hilarity-est.

… and Violence

And for our final hand we return to PokerStars. This advert was originally run in Germany according to the youtube descriptions. With it, PokerStars manage to beat even ‘join the queue, buddy’ with this surrealist blend of elegance, violence, and sermonising.

If you know of some more, stick ‘em in the comments.