Zynga PokerCon: Looking At It The Wrong Way

Zynga, the social gaming company behind hugely popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, also has the largest online poker site in the world -- their 38 million users make them bigger than PokerStars. 

The poker industry never paid much attention to Zynga, because they don't play by our rules. They don't advertise in poker magazines, they don't have a presence at the WSOP, and they don't sponsor professional players. With headquarters in San Francisco (near the heart of Silicon Valley), there is little connection between their employees and those of us in the poker industry, making rumors and inside information hard to come by.

But when Zynga announced they would be holding a two-day "PokerCon" at the Palms, everyone in poker suddenly paid attention. There seemed to be a lot of hopes and fears (depending on your view) that Zynga would eventually make a move to dominate the poker industry as we know it. 

For example, those of us in the industry see everything through the lens of legalized online poker in the U.S., so we naturally assume that Zynga must be thinking the same way. But while sites like WSOP.com effectively wait in the wings for poker legislation, and Full Tilt and PokerStars skirt the limits of the law and hold their breath as more and more payment processors are shut down, ZyngaPoker happily -- and legally -- collects millions and millions of dollars from their players. And they can even pay by U.S. credit cards. 

Many people in the poker industry will tell you (as if it were fact) that Zynga will open an online site if (when?) online poker is legalized in the United States. There is, however, one big flaw in that argument -- ZyngaPoker is already an international site. If they're making a play for regular online poker (the kind we're used to), why not open up a European-facing poker site the way that WSOP.com did?

If you ask their executives, they'll tell you that they have no plans to open an online site like PokerStars or Full Tilt. Based on their actions so far, I'm inclined to believe them. (Like any good company, they may change their plans in the future as circumstances change, of course.)

So Poker's collective eyes were on the Zynga PokerCon this past weekend, but most of them didn't understand what they saw. They saw Annie Duke teaching classes, but that was nothing new -- WSOP Academy, Deepstacks University, and WPT Boot Camp have been doing that for years. Everything else at Zynga PokerCon had also been done before -- meet-and-greets with pros like Doyle Brunson and Mike Sexton, a tournament with a large overlay, and a big party at a trendy night club to close out the weekend. 

Many poker observers came away from the weekend feeling like they hadn't seen anything interesting. It had all been done before. 

But the key difference at Zynga PokerCon was the players. This was an extremely different group than you'd find at something like the PCA (PokerStars Caribbean Adventure) -- it was an older demographic, with a much higher percentage of women. While the fundamentals of the game are the same, many of these people play ZyngaPoker for different reasons than the online pros play at Full Tilt or PokerStars. I spent about half the day on Saturday meeting different Zynga players and talking to them in depth, and it was enlightening. Regardless of what the poker industry thinks of PokerCon, the players who were there absolutely loved it, and everyone I asked hoped to return again next year.

I will be writing more about the Zynga PokerCon later this week (and posting one or two full photo blogs), because there is still much more to be said. But if anyone tells you that this weekend was a bust or that there was nothing new worth seeing -- they weren't looking deep enough.