Not Your Average Sunday Stream

When I woke up Sunday morning, I had a pretty simple plan for the day. Go to the gym, grab some lunch, watch the New York Giants lose to the Green Bay Packers, all while periodically checking updates of the PokerStars Championship Bahamas Main Event. By mid-day, Day 1A updates of the PCB Main Event were forgotten, there was no saving the New York Giants and my face was five inches from my iPhone streaming Bill Perkin’s Twitch channel.

With so many streams out there, it’s hard for one to stick out among the weekend crowd. ‘The Thirst Lounge’ did yesterday, as Perkins spent a few hours streaming a must-watch $200/$400 No Limit Hold’em cash game session on PokerStars. Across the room, Jeff Gross streamed his usual tournament schedule and poker professional Matthew Waxman was in and out of each stream providing analysis. There was no doubt as to who the main attraction was though. 

Perkins has been making waves on Twitch over the last month, starting by giving away twenty PokerStars Championship Bahamas packages to his stream followers. Perkins is also one of the first players to bring higher stakes to a streaming audience, as most Twitchers primarily play smaller stakes.

Sunday’s stream began with a handful of those smaller tournaments but after an hour and a half, Perkins said he was, “Ready to go HAM.”

For those not up on the lingo, that means “Hard as a mother-“, you get it. Perkins did go hard and the $200/$400 NL game started. It lasted just over three hours before Perkins got involved in a massive flip for a nearly $170,000 pot. Perkins’ nut flush draw couldn’t come in against pocket queens, shipping the pot to his opponent and ending the day’s stream.

That beat, along with a few bullets in the series opening $100,000 buy-in Super High Roller, means that 2017 hasn’t started how Perkins may have liked. If he’s able to continue to draw a new audience to Twitch though, through promotions and high stakes action, Perkins could single-handedly be changing the way poker players think about streaming.