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Solana, a blockchain platform that sponsored this year’s World Series of Poker, is working with a team of independent creators on something called “WSOLP,” which it describes as “Poker’s Premiere Fantasy Championship.”
WSOLP doesn’t appear to stand for anything, but is a portmanteau of WSOP and SOL, the latter being Solana’s flagship crypto token. Rather than using $SOL, however, the new product has its own token, $WSOLP, which is already available to trade. It has a market capitalization of $766,000 and trades for about $0.0007 per token as of this writing.
Although the project has WSOP’s blessing, it isn’t directly involved.
What users will do with $WSOLP is more complicated to explain. The finished product hasn’t been released yet, but the marketing team has given PokerScout a broad overview of the vision. This seems to be a multi-faceted experience for poker fans, unified by Solana’s blockchain technology and the $WSOLP token.
For now, what has been released is a 3D environment that will become the product’s interface. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Vegas Infinite (formerly known as PokerStars VR), but centered around a virtual recreation of the WSOP’s “Mothership” featured table stage. A representative told PokerScout:
The entire WSOLP experience lives within a tokenized, fully activated 3D Casino world that is live and ready to explore today. While gameplay is still on the horizon, you can jump in right now with your own custom avatar to explore the new Main Stage and watch live WSOP streams.
So, at minimum, virtual spectatorship of real-world WSOP events is going to be part of the experience. However, there will also be various ways for users to have some skin in the game.
Draft, Stake, Observe, and Play Through a Single Interface
Looking over the plans for WSOLP, the impression I get is that the project owners and Solana got together and brainstormed things that a crypto platform could do with a poker brand. Then, instead of choosing one of those ideas, they decided to do all of them.
First and foremost, though, it is positioning itself as a fantasy product. PokerScout’s contact says that should be ready to go no later than July 1. Players will enter contests using $WSOLP, draft real-world WSOP players, and try to win prizes that are then paid out through the blockchain.
The site features AI-generated likenesses of Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Tom Dwan, Toly Yakovenko, Mert Mumtaz, and Phil Ivey. Hilariously, the latter is depicted in his promotional attire for Full Tilt Poker — a site that shut down 15 years ago.
Instead of watching a stream or refreshing chipcounts in their browser, participants can follow the action from the virtual rail on the game’s 3D stage. The in-game action will follow the live stream, meaning it will be on a delay of about two hours, but include hole cards.
There also appears to be plans for a staking platform, so users can directly buy a piece of players’ real-world action instead of just drafting them in a fantasy contest.
Finally, the long-term plans for the product include turning it into a functioning cryptocurrency poker room.
The representative told PokerScout:
We are creating a decentralized, on-chain Fantasy Poker Layer that transforms spectators worldwide into active participants. Users can build leaderboards and predict who will win major tournaments, including the Main Event and WSOP Paradise.
Moving forward, we will also integrate cash games, MTTs (Multi-Table Tournaments), and other gameplay options between major events.
They had originally described the project as a collaboration, but subsequently clarified that WSOLP is “an independent project doing its best to support the Solana x WSOP partnership.”
Change of Ownership Means New Directions for WSOP
If veering into cryptocurrency, video gaming, and an as-yet-unregulated fantasy product seems out of character for the WSOP, it is. However, it’s entirely in character for its new owner, GGPoker. It’s important to note that neither is directly involved with the product, but the project has their blessing, and it something the brand’s previous owners might have been more hesitant to allow.
Asked about the nature of the relationship with WSOP, the representative told PokerScout:
No contract. Just blessing. Not formally affiliated, just a win for all parties in the industry.
For most of its modern history, the series was owned by Caesars. Like any retail casino company, Caesars views poker as a customer-acquisition tool more than as a money maker. For decades, it has brought players to Las Vegas, into the casinos, and forced them to sign up as Caesars Rewards members in order to register for events.
At the same time, it is very hesitant to venture outside the confines of formally-regulated gambling spaces. Anything that might raise a regulator’s eyebrow is not worth it in comparison to the cash cow of retail casino operations.
Not so for GGPoker, for which poker has always been the main business, and which is forever seeking new ways not so much to break out of that box as to make it bigger. As a different sort of experiment, we’ve also just seen WSOP open a merchandise store on the Strip as a new revenue stream.
GGPoker also has a longstanding comfort with technology and unregulated spaces — even now, as it moves increasingly into regulated markets, a significant portion of its network traffic comes through third-party partners serving markets like Russia and China.
In that context, it’s not quite as surprising to see a WSOP brand that’s more open to allowing third parties to explore ideas involving virtual worlds, blockchain, cryptocurrency, poker investment, and so forth. Expect to see more creative and sometimes bizarre ideas out of and relating to WSOP under its new owners.
Correction: This article originally described WSOLP as a “collaboration” between WSOP and Solana, but it has since been clarified that the relationship with WSOP is more arms-length than that.
