Karan Vig, Head of Productions At Mind Sports League Spills The Beans About IOPC’s Streams

The eleventh edition of India Online Poker Championship (IOPC) started on 11 July and ran till 1 August. The featured tournaments of IOPC were livestreamed across IOPC partnered with Hashtag Media Productions, run by Sidharth Mishra, Karan Vig, and Sreetama Vig to host live streams. We got in touch with Karan Vig, Head of Productions, Mind Sports League to know more about how the brand works and their experience with IOPC.

How have the streams with IOPC been so far?

IOPC streams are always fun! If you look at the streams, from the day we started, we have aimed to capture a fresh new audience. With the 11th edition of IOPC, it feels good to get such great turnovers in terms of viewership. This motivates us to innovate and make the streams more interactive and viewer-friendly.

Poker Sports League (PSL) vs IOPC, what distinguishes both the brands and their approach to streaming tournaments?

We at Hashtag Productions always believed in challenging our limits. PSL being a team league, the challenges were different. Along with the gameplay and commentators we also had to manage the video feeds of the players. This does not mean IOPC streams are easy to handle. Spartan Poker is known for bringing in technological innovations in their app, they already had the feature of face-up cards and during IOPC, the brand came up with the selective hand re-player feature. This enabled players to replay the best selective moments from the tournaments exactly as you see in other sports like cricket or football during live streams.

Has streaming changed the way poker is looked at in the country?

As a company, we realized that streams offer interactive learning and also increase awareness towards poker as a mind sport. India is a country where poker has always been surrounded by several misconceptions. With the increasing number of viewer-friendly streams people have slowly started to realize that skill is the prevalent factor to win this game and it’s not a game of chances. This has inspired many to learn poker and play it.

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Manthra Koliyer

Manthra Koliyer is a writer at Gutshot Magazine. She has an affinity for seeing the world through people’s eyes. With a bubbly fun personality, you can always catch her chatting with anyone she comes across. Holding an English Literature degree from Wilson College, Mumbai, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism from Asian College of Journalism, this pop culture fanatic is ready to take on the world with a pen, paper, and microphone. She also actively works on her personal blog called namasteyconvict.blogspot.com, where for a moment she lets you into her drama-filled world.