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Poker pro Bertrand “Elkypoker” Grospellier this weekend competed in the SCOOP 2015 $2K buy-in, finishing in 6th place. Ultimately it was Jason Mercier who won the online tournament event, racking up a cool $178,457.
The real story here appears to have been the more than 16000 Internet users who logged on to watch Grospellier’s Twitch feed.
“Elkypoker” - as most refer to him since “Bertrand Grospellier” sounds like a character from a French version of “Upstairs, Downstairs” - has amassed one of the largest followings on Twitch, a popular live streaming video social media network.
“Elkypoker” just happens to be one of the top StarCraft players in the world, finishing second in the World Cyber Games in 2001 and going one better in the Euro Cyber Games in 2003. He’s managed to draw interest from both the poker community and e-sports/gaming world to his Twitch feed.
In April, he announced his “retirement” from poker to go back to StarCraft. That turned out to be short-lived however, at least the part about leaving poker.
“I want to get back into video games now because it's so big, and I also started doing it on Twitch,” Grospellier told Vice Media recently. “People in poker have also got into Twitch, and they have music – they are going to expand into everything. You can do whatever you want, basically, as there's so much freedom. Video games are so popular, it's crazy – Twitch has $100,000 visitors a month. You can engage with your audience a lot because you're broadcasting and they can talk to you via a chat box. They're like, ‘Hey, high five!’ and you're like, ‘Hey, high five!’ So you can interact with them and it's really fun and you can tell them what you're thinking about.”
- Nagesh Rath, Gambling911.com
