JASON SOMERVILLE INTERVIEW
the deals he strikes with partners include advertising on the stream. That includes casinos like the Peppermill, which hosts the Run It Up Reno, and PokerStars, which hosted a RunItUp event at the New Jersey Festival in Atlantic City. Past deals have also included the daily fantasy sports site DraftKings.
“Obviously I have several different other revenue
sources that bring in money, and poker is just one of the many at this point,” he says. “It’s been rewarding. We just did Run It Up Reno, which we run twice a year. People flew in from Russia, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, Alaska, Hawaii, and all across the U.S. and Canada to play in RunItUp Reno all based off the stream. It’s amazing and just a fragment of the community coming together. And that event has continued to grow since we’ve been doing it the last two or three years.”
The business also sells merchandise and keeping the operation running now involves eight other employees besides Somerville. Two people work full- time on the stream as well as a producer, and a graphic artist. Another employee helps with stats and presentations and a bookkeeper pays invoices and manages accounting. Two employees manage his online store.
“I would say at this point it’s a legitimate small
business,” he says. “We’ve sold something like $200,000 worth of T-shirts and hoodies over the last two years, and that’s about the smallest part of the business. So that alone is its own thing. We design the clothes, we manufacture them through a third- party, do all the shipping and handling ourselves. So that is just one portion of the Run It Up business.
“This is my life. I haven’t been a professional poker
player in years. I play for fun, I play on the stream a lot, but my primary income is not poker. My primary income is the stream in building it.
EXPANSION, GROWTH, & ACTIVISM
With the growth of RunItUp, Somerville is looking
for even more growth. Along with his Reno events, his group also runs RunItUp Calgary in conjunction with the Deepstacks Poker Tour. He also partnered with the Aussie Millions poker tournament earlier this year to lead its multimedia efforts. He hopes more opportunities are on the horizon.
Poker has been on the upswing over the last year
with record turnouts at the World Series of Poker and other major tournaments. New media efforts have capitalized on the demand for more coverage and live action. Video blog efforts by poker pros like Daniel Negreanu and Doug Polk have drawn millions of views, and ESPN’s live coverage of the WSOP throughout the summer was well-received.
The online streaming service PokerGO also 56 OCTOBER 2017
debuted this year, offering live coverage of the WSOP, poker documentaries, and offering new tournament coverage including live final tables of the World Poker Tour. The service has even revived popular poker shows like “Poker After Dark” as it attempts to establish a significant number of players willing to pay for more poker.
Somerville finds himself among those leading the game into the future and hoping to attract even more players and fans.
Others in the industry have taken note and see
RunItUp’s effects on the game. Phil Hellmuth, winner of 14 World Series of Poker bracelets and author of the new autobiography Poker Brat, has seen the ups and downs of the industry first-hand after more than three decades in the game. A part of the ESPN broadcast crew for the WSOP and new host of the WPT’s “Raw Deal” instructional segment, Hellmuth sees a real poker revival with players like Somerville leading the way.
“I’m proud of Jason, and he’s a good guy,” says
Hellmuth. “He is building something, and it’s great for poker. He is doing things the right way: hard work, good entertainment, great content. Poker is on a big upswing right now: the WSOP being live for 12 days, PokerGo cranking out great content, Twitch and social media poker player stars crushing it, and poker shows returning in full force to television.”
Overall, about 30-40 percent of the RunItUp audience is from the U.S., which works out to about 100,000 to 150,000 unique American viewers, Somerville says. Along with building his platform, he hopes to mobilize an army of poker fans to help change laws at the state and federal level concerning the legalization of online poker.
“Promoting regulated online poker means a lot to me because as an American there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to play online poker when we can do things like play daily fantasy sports, buy lottery tickets, and bet on horse races and all other number of silly things,” he says. “So I’ve taken that role very seriously as well.”
With poker booming again, Somerville is looking at
even more on the horizon. “I’m trying different configurations of things,” he
says. “I want to see what works, and I’m open to trial and error.”
Sean Chaffin is a freelance writer in Crandall,
Texas, and writes frequently about gambling and poker. If you have any story ideas, please email him at
seanchaffin@sbcglobal.net or follow him @PokerTraditions. His poker book is RAISING THE STAKES: True Tales of Gambling, Wagering & Poker Faces and available on
Amazon.com.
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