Alex Dreyfus Plans To Launch Global Poker League

Alex Dreyfus, the CEO of the Global Poker Index has focused on aggressively promoting his brand and marketing the game of poker as a game of skill. Dreyfus has been responsible for launching a number of new initiatives during the past few months, one of which was the Global Poker Masters (GPM).

The GPM was the first time when a teams from different countries competed in a game of poker. Teams from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Italy, Germany, Ukraine and Russia took part and in the end it was Team France who ended up winning the first ever GPM 2015 tournament.

The GPM received a lot of media attention in Europe and was broadcasted via Twitch and received a total of 1.2 million views. The event proved to be a great success and Dreyfus plans to launch a similar event in 2016.

Dreyfus has now set his goal on launching the first ever Global Poker League and expects this professional poker league to go live by the end of August or early September 2015. The GPL is being billed as one of the biggest events on the poker calendar and will consist of eight teams that have a total of seven players each. The team selection will be made on the basis of the top three players that feature on the GPI 500 or GPI 300 list, two qualifiers and two wildcards.

The team will be selected right after the completion of the WSOP and the GPL will run for a total of 10 weeks. Dreyfus did not reveal any information about the format of the event but confirmed that his company would invest around $5 million into the event to make it a success. More information about the format of the event will be released in the weeks to come.

In a statement, Dreyfus said

In my opinion, if you want poker to grow and to become mainstream, you need to create engagement and a fan base, and I believe the only way to do that is through team poker. The formula worked well with the Masters, but that’s an event that happens only once a year and only for a few days. Now that we know that team poker can work, we want to build something new, something much bigger than that.