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Brand Channing
How did 'Brand Channing' start, and what perks do you think this gives you above other professional poker players?
Also what are the detrimental effects of fame that you face, whether it's harder to get a good game, as people know you you are etc.
Also what are the detrimental effects of fame that you face, whether it's harder to get a good game, as people know you you are etc.
Do you net put in more time and effort into being recognised, or is it just something that happened organically and takes very little effort, and the stuff you do on sky and in the lobbies is purely because you like adding to the poker community.
thanks, Barrattg
Comments
I certainly remember playing an event in Southampton in 2000. I won the £50 event which was called the South of England Championship and which game with a small trophy. The next day the tournament was £100 and I heard a couple of people saying "Here comes that Channing" and being worried about me being on their table. When I made the final one guy said we should just give me the trophy. I was already winning a lot of the small events around London playing 6 a week and people were definitely aware of me. TV poker had only just started though with Late Night Poker and I'd decided not to play in that one.
I think it was 2004 when I started blogging, really just to stop people from constantly asking me how I was getting on when I was in Vegas...I had a few backers and knew a lot of gamblers who were all wishing they were there. After just a few blogs I decided to start sending them to people in my email address book and soon 500 people were getting them. The Gutshot site and The Hendon Mob site asked me at around the same time if I'd allow my blogs to be published exclusively there. I was a regular poster on the Gutshot forum as well as a player in their cardroom but mostly I liked the people who posted on The Hendon Mob site and I was friends with Joe so I went with them. In 2006 it was suggested that I should write a monthly column for Bluff and I accepted.
Looking back I don't think I did any of these things purely as I wanted to build a brand but as it started to go a bit crazy and when I started playing bigger and every day I found I didn't have time for all the writing, staking, bit of training, running corporate poker nights and some TV commentary. By now I did start to think about how I could better monetise all this stuff and definitely I could see some advantages. In 2009 I remember going to Australia for the first time and meeting a friend who I knew from the UK who had been out there a few years, he set up a friend of his to rush over and ask for my autograph and say she loved watching me on TV which she thought would be really funny. At a night at the races in the UK another friend got a girl to do the same thing...neither of them realised that this sort of thing had been happening four times a week in 2008...I was doing autographs pretty regularly and when Black Belt had it's office in Dean Street I would walk there from home and during the length of Oxford Street I'd ALWAYS be recognised at least once, there was a day when I got noticed seven times. Casinos of course became completely different, people would stop me all the time and would often point and whisper.
There are definitely advantages. I would get offered free hotels if I went to some events and blogged and wrote in Bluff about the tournament. Sometimes I'd get a free entry in the side event. Sometimes poker sites block book hotels a long time in advance before they know how many qualifiers they might have and I'd often get given a free room if one was going spare. Some of the cash games I played on TV had added money and they were good.
My attempt to tie all the elements of "Brand Channing" together was not totally successful...I lost a lot of money with Black Belt and we were definitely too generous with the benefits early on and spent way too much on salaries and software develpment. The main negative I had was the huge amount of time I spent messaging and replying to peple who often had no real intention of doing what we asked to be staked and who didn't ever play a hand on the site. I certainly enjoyed being part of our little community and I hope I became good friends with some of the regular members. Some people were horribly mean and annoying though and I wish I'd been stricter in banning and blocking some. We also had a bit of a problem with a small number of online trolls.
The worse thing has probably been all the beggars and those that want staking who are completely unrealistic about how that might work. Many people who I still see around the circuit making all the same mistakes as they made ten years ago and doing nothing to attempt to improve at poker wrote the most detailed messages containing details of their life, their family, their health problems and their financial issues and expecting me to wave a magic wand and "cure" them. I used to find that pretty sad. I could answer most questions about poker staking by directing people to the very expensive site we set up and the system we laid out to get staked. Less than 1% of those people would make any serious attempt to do what was required they just thought they fancied a free holiday to play an EPT or a GUKPT and I might pay. I found that pretty depressing to be honest.
These days I don't particularly attempt to be recognised. I've realised that broadcast media and social media are the best ways to get yourself noticed so I try and appear on Sky Poker TV more than the contract suggests I ought to and I always say yes to media interviews and podcasts even though I don't get paid for them. I also spend huge amounts of time on Twitter which I'm totally addicted to.
I don't think I'll ever earn enough money to make up for the time I spent on BBP and that I still spend on Facebook and Twitter but I guess without all these things Sky may not have signed me up. Sky have been very flexible over what I do for them and it's great. We are both working together for the same aim and I enjoy the stuff I "have" to do here.
Really good question. Cheers.