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What Happened To The WSOB?
08-17-2010
, 03:28 PM
hi
Having read your post about “where is WSOB”, I thought I would offer a little background and insight into our current thinking and what and where WSOB is going. It's a bit of a read, but some may find the following interesting, I hope.
WSOB is very much alive and kicking though! We are going through some changes this year though, evaluating what our assets are, what are successes and failures have been and how best to move forward, especially in this tricky climate
Only a few months ago, we did complete our extremely ambitious Season III (with a few bumps and scrapes along the way
) but which did see one of the biggest backgammon tournaments ever seen - our $480,000 season finale, following our series of high buy-in tournaments held at superb locations in Cannes, Prague and London, which again I was glad to see lived up to the WSOB name saw the highest quality fields of players and biggest money in the game.
We have also now achieved broadcast in 60 countries and around 2000 hours air time – reality: with the kind of slots we had on Eurosport, still no where near enough to reach a tipping point for backgammon to grow fast (poker is way too dominant anyway) - and this remains tiny in comparison to poker of course; what is pleasing though is the customer/player feedback especially to the 2008 productions and we now have I think a bench-mark for producing live or pre-recorded TV coverage for the future, in terms of creating great televisual tournaments and how we actually produce for the screen.
One player wrote to me recently asking about the next tour exclaiming “playing WSOB is on my list of life things to do” and another wrote on the wall on the Online TV Channel, “I have watched every show at least 25 times, some more please!”. Feedback like this makes me think WSOB has got some things right and has a big future, in the right hands.
But Season II and III (2009-10) took a considerable investment, especially by casino operator, Groupe Partouche, who were unbelievably bold at the time, investing hugely in the TV production and developing the brand from '07 - '09. Filming a board game on expensive locations, with bells and whistles, not so cheap!
But for some catastrophic technical issues and some quite poor decision-making with their own brand online backgammon site, I think we would be in very good shape now commercially, with a super online and offline partnership.
Trouble is, one-off high visibility tournaments set around Europe are extremely expensive to run and probably not viable whilst online backgammon remains relatively 'weak' and can not compete with poker, married with the harmful [incorrect] perception of cheating being rife in online bg – basically a cocktail for online apathy, terrible for the game, players and entire backgammon economy.
However, we are not standing still and do have continued dialogues with some other major gaming companies with a view to attracting them to partner us, as we did amazingly with Partygaming and Partouche in 2006 and 2007 respectively - when WSOB was really quite immature!
In May this year, we re-launched our online backgammon platform but with really superb technology – the very best in my view with tech that could really support our need to have a world class game client, fitting for the brand and which could run secure, safe, big money WSOB online tournaments for everyone; satellites for ours and other live events alongside money and free play www.PlayWSOB.com
We also started promoting our new online tour "WSOB ONLINE TOUR" on PlayWSOB.com, which is running right now - we have had over 6,000 entries to sub satellites in the past week alone, trying to qualify for the second of five online stops year - STOP 2 will take place on August 29th and as usual we have an end of season finale with the WSOB PLAY-OFFS- so we’re hoping to get a bit of buzz going on this and in turn will attract other major gaming companies not just into online backgammon, but into promoting it and WSOB online/offline.
Anyway online is our main focus in 2010, but with a view to launching a major offline tournament, more akin to World Series of Poker, next year in Vegas; that's our ambition and what we're assessing now.
So what we know we need for WSOB to develop further, is a vital online backgammon platform, free of cheats and run by backgammon players, which will provide the capital needed to invest to make a major offline event viable ie WSOB LAS VEGAS - and one which will in particular attract enough investment or have the resources, again, to produce high quality live and pre-recorded television coverage - ESPN and EUROSPORT both STILL want content from us.
We are also quite excited about interactive live webcasting following our experiments last year in Prague. We know we can produce a near TV quality presentation a lot cheaper on the net and bg deserves live action.
My other ambition is to make WSOB truly a players’ company, run by players. Several leading players are already share-holders; I am also a player, but after 5 years in charge of it, a new group may be able to take this project forward with new ideas, along with some super assets and ideas accumulated. Any ideas? ;-)
I hope that goes some way to answering your questions but please do feedback here or directly with any further comments, which will be welcome.
Andy
Having read your post about “where is WSOB”, I thought I would offer a little background and insight into our current thinking and what and where WSOB is going. It's a bit of a read, but some may find the following interesting, I hope.
WSOB is very much alive and kicking though! We are going through some changes this year though, evaluating what our assets are, what are successes and failures have been and how best to move forward, especially in this tricky climate
Only a few months ago, we did complete our extremely ambitious Season III (with a few bumps and scrapes along the way
) but which did see one of the biggest backgammon tournaments ever seen - our $480,000 season finale, following our series of high buy-in tournaments held at superb locations in Cannes, Prague and London, which again I was glad to see lived up to the WSOB name saw the highest quality fields of players and biggest money in the game.We have also now achieved broadcast in 60 countries and around 2000 hours air time – reality: with the kind of slots we had on Eurosport, still no where near enough to reach a tipping point for backgammon to grow fast (poker is way too dominant anyway) - and this remains tiny in comparison to poker of course; what is pleasing though is the customer/player feedback especially to the 2008 productions and we now have I think a bench-mark for producing live or pre-recorded TV coverage for the future, in terms of creating great televisual tournaments and how we actually produce for the screen.
One player wrote to me recently asking about the next tour exclaiming “playing WSOB is on my list of life things to do” and another wrote on the wall on the Online TV Channel, “I have watched every show at least 25 times, some more please!”. Feedback like this makes me think WSOB has got some things right and has a big future, in the right hands.
But Season II and III (2009-10) took a considerable investment, especially by casino operator, Groupe Partouche, who were unbelievably bold at the time, investing hugely in the TV production and developing the brand from '07 - '09. Filming a board game on expensive locations, with bells and whistles, not so cheap!
But for some catastrophic technical issues and some quite poor decision-making with their own brand online backgammon site, I think we would be in very good shape now commercially, with a super online and offline partnership.
Trouble is, one-off high visibility tournaments set around Europe are extremely expensive to run and probably not viable whilst online backgammon remains relatively 'weak' and can not compete with poker, married with the harmful [incorrect] perception of cheating being rife in online bg – basically a cocktail for online apathy, terrible for the game, players and entire backgammon economy.
However, we are not standing still and do have continued dialogues with some other major gaming companies with a view to attracting them to partner us, as we did amazingly with Partygaming and Partouche in 2006 and 2007 respectively - when WSOB was really quite immature!
In May this year, we re-launched our online backgammon platform but with really superb technology – the very best in my view with tech that could really support our need to have a world class game client, fitting for the brand and which could run secure, safe, big money WSOB online tournaments for everyone; satellites for ours and other live events alongside money and free play www.PlayWSOB.com
We also started promoting our new online tour "WSOB ONLINE TOUR" on PlayWSOB.com, which is running right now - we have had over 6,000 entries to sub satellites in the past week alone, trying to qualify for the second of five online stops year - STOP 2 will take place on August 29th and as usual we have an end of season finale with the WSOB PLAY-OFFS- so we’re hoping to get a bit of buzz going on this and in turn will attract other major gaming companies not just into online backgammon, but into promoting it and WSOB online/offline.
Anyway online is our main focus in 2010, but with a view to launching a major offline tournament, more akin to World Series of Poker, next year in Vegas; that's our ambition and what we're assessing now.
So what we know we need for WSOB to develop further, is a vital online backgammon platform, free of cheats and run by backgammon players, which will provide the capital needed to invest to make a major offline event viable ie WSOB LAS VEGAS - and one which will in particular attract enough investment or have the resources, again, to produce high quality live and pre-recorded television coverage - ESPN and EUROSPORT both STILL want content from us.
We are also quite excited about interactive live webcasting following our experiments last year in Prague. We know we can produce a near TV quality presentation a lot cheaper on the net and bg deserves live action.
My other ambition is to make WSOB truly a players’ company, run by players. Several leading players are already share-holders; I am also a player, but after 5 years in charge of it, a new group may be able to take this project forward with new ideas, along with some super assets and ideas accumulated. Any ideas? ;-)
I hope that goes some way to answering your questions but please do feedback here or directly with any further comments, which will be welcome.
Andy
Last edited by AndyBell; 08-17-2010 at 03:45 PM.