Jason Somerville's 37,000 Viewers A New Twitch Poker Record

For the past year, Jason Somerville has been entertaining poker fans by streaming his live sessions on Twitch.tv, and in March 2015 the 28 year-old pro set a new Twitch poker attendance record when 22,000 viewers tuned in to watch him play. That record has now been broken, after an impressive 37,000 people simultaneously attended his jcarverpoker twitch channel to see him compete in one of the opening event’s of this year’s World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) on PokerStars.
Jason Somerville entered the $700 buy-in Progressive Super Knockout from his second home in Toronto, Canada, as online poker is available in just three US states, all of whom are isolated from the wider global iPoker market. The thousands of fans who watched him play were subsequently treated to some great poker, too, with Somerville managing to progress all the way through to the event’s final table. The WSOP bracelet winner would eventually finish in 6th place for a $22,673 score, which together with his $15,666 in bounties, netted him a cool $38,339. As Somerville tweeted following his fine performance:
“damn what a fun night! thank you guys so much for hanging out with me, hope it’s not the last deep run this #WCOOP xD back for more tmw!”
While Somerville almost doubled his own personal Twitch record, there is every chance he will go on to smash that record, too, as the WCOOP is scheduled to run all through September, with the WCOOP $51,000 Super High Roller taking place next weekend. While driving interest in online poker forward, live streaming does give his opponent’s a chance to observe his play in action, albeit with a slight delay. When questioned whether this disadvantages him, Sommerville replied:
“I never really felt like I was at a disadvantage, there was thankfully a hearty delay on the stream. I was very honest on the stream with what I was thinking. I’m used to it by now, I’m used to not being sure if my opponent knows me or is watching. It was almost like I was playing live poker when they were playing online poker, because they might be watching me.”