Poker Streamers Form House of Poker

(Photo: Pokerindustrypro.com)

I have written before about my love of poker being streamed on Twitch and I recently also recorded a video interview with Jaime “Pokerstaples” Staples where we discussed streaming, poker play, and his reactions to the big news stories of the day. You probably know that the most popular poker streamers get thousands of viewers if they make a run at a final table, and with the appropriate time delay to protect the integrity of the games, they have taken railbirding to another level and given players access to their thought processes as high stakes players like never before.

In a recent interview, poker streamer Jeff Gross, whose Twitch stream can be found here, revealed that he and a number of popular Twitch streamers including Pokerstaples had discussed plans to move into a dedicated “poker house” which would ensure they were as dedicated as possible to building their Twitch streams and also staying ahead of the game as professional poker players. Jeff talked to CalvinAyre.com recently about how he likes to associate himself with people he wants to be like and keeps this in his thoughts as he redoubles his focus on poker moving forward as he approaches his 30th birthday in September this year.

A glance at Jeff’s Twitch channel reveals unbelievable amounts of effort and organisation to integrate customized graphics, give his viewers tons of information and offers, clothing, giveaways, and perks for subscribers to prove beyond any doubt that he will do what is necessary to become a top poker streamer. It’s clearly working as he has just under 13,000 followers so far and is partnered with Twitch so he can accept subscribers.

The plans for the poker stream house have been mentioned by Pokerstaples on his own stream too, with Vancouver, Canada being a possible destination. Pokerstaples already lives with his brother Matt, whose Twitch stream is growing in popularity. Matt is known as “PokerStaplesPA” on Twitch as, for a short time when Jaime was beginning to become very popular, he paid Matt to be his personal assistant. Jaime has similar intentions for the house as Jeff, wanting to redouble his efforts to improve his stream's popularity and his own personal success at the tables.

During the interview, Jeff revealed that his potential housemates in the new poker house would be Jaime Staples, Matt Staples, and Parker “Tonkaaaa” Talbot. Parker is a very successful Twitch streamer, getting thousands of viewers watching him play poker whenever he is streaming. His Twitch stream can be found here and has 31,000 followers but this is growing very quickly. Parker gets a high retention, and having watched his stream a number of times, I can advise he rarely has under 1000 viewers at any one time and often achieves many more than that because he regularly plays tournaments with buy-ins of $1000 or more!

What excites me about these guys started a poker streaming house is that each of their channels are of a similar size. They are well-developed with a strong fan-base but none of them are out there in terms of having huge numbers of followers that are vastly out of line with the others. I therefore hope they “cross pollinate” their channels to share the love and help one another's channels grow.

They all have some way to go to catch Jason Somerville, whose follower count stands at 182,086 at the time of writing. But with the new poker house sharpening their minds to the rigors of poker streaming, these channels could drag one another up a level or two and challenge Jason for poker streamings top spot. I’d love to see that happen as poker streaming is, for me and many others, the window to high stakes poker I may otherwise not have access to.