Vegas High Roller Vlogs It All

As YouTube continues to draw players away from Twitch, lured by the greater creative freedom (and possibly advertising revenue) that recorded videos have over live, one of the players who seems to have taken to the format like a duck to water is Andrew Neeme, whose videos are boosted by a thoughtful and likeable screen presence and the kind of production values you get when your vids are funded by a successful Vegas grind.

Starting out in October this year with a pilot blog that broadly sets the format for the series: a talking head preamble, a few Vegas montages, some poker, hand analysis and a wind down over a beer with a few thoughts to tie off the video.

Neeme’s videos do run long for this sort of thing at 15 to 20 minutes, but most of the other poker bloggers out there aren’t much pithier and certainly not all of them are as watchable. His in-depth approach seems to be working, having shot up from zero subscribers to over twenty-three thousand as at the time of writing. And he’s only been at it for a couple of months.

There are also a couple of nice gimmicks he’s come up with, after a few episodes he works out a system of split screening with a talking head on one side and the footage of the hand on the other, details written across the top. Easy to watch and easy to follow. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of that sort of thing on other poker vlogs in the near future.

He also doesn’t shy away from showing us the downside. Nothing is more conducive to that sense of camaraderie between vlogger and audience than sharing the humiliations of defeat. The session by session style of the blog means that we get to see him go busto early, take the occasional bad beat on the chin and wrestle with the existential difficulties of the pro’s life as well as making bank.

It’ll be interesting to see how his channel grows.