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BGonline.org Forums
Professional backgammon players
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Professional backgammon players (Chiva Tafazzoli)
Date: Monday, 19 July 2010, at 11:17 p.m.
Not many people would be willing to pay to view a backgammon event. Ultimately I think the more realistic model is for advertisers to pay for the broadcast. Advertisers of course will pay only if they think they will get a sizable audience, either now or in the foreseeable future. There is certainly a chicken-and-egg problem here that is difficult to solve. To some extent I think one has to rely on some lucky combination of factors to create a surge in popularity, and one cannot necessarily "engineer" business success for a particular game. For poker, the trick of letting the home audience view the hole cards seems to have been a crucial catalyst. For backgammon it's not so clear if there's a similar magic formula that can kickstart it out of its current doldrums, especially when it has to compete with poker.
On the other hand, one thing that I think is possible is to prepare for success and to capitalize on it when it arrives, rather than just taking it for granted and having it fizzle out. Backgammon had a heyday; why did it fizzle out? I'm sure that there were many reasons but part of the reason was probably that nobody, or not enough people, were alert enough to recognize that positive action needed to be taken to sustain its popularity. The idea of a pro tour, which started this thread of discussion, is quite a good one in this context. The card game Magic had unbelievable success for a while. The creators knew that its outrageous popularity would not last forever, and the creation of a Magic pro tour was one thing they did to try to sustain it. And it worked pretty well; of course Magic sales did taper off from its peak, but it didn't entirely flame out like some other fads, because the creators had taken steps to produce long-term sustainability.
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