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Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin Discuss WPT Global, Patreon and WSOP

Inside the Poker Circles / / By

Images courtesy of Irish Poker Open

Poker has become a game that not only centers around each player’s experience at the poker table but their lives around it too. As content creation has grown, so too has the average poker fan’s interest in players. What do they do when they’re not playing poker? How did they come to that decision in the last game they played? And why did they have that major disagreement recently?

All these questions could be levelled at both Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin. For many years now, they have performed in and produced The Chip Race, a Global Poker Award-winning podcast that hosts interviews with some of the game’s biggest names and provides news, strategy tips and insights in the game we all love from multiple perspectives.

We caught up with both Dara and David to find out when they decided to put their content more in the hands of their fans, how they’re doing so, and exactly what happened after that WPT Global row.

A Course of Action

This week, Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin are at the coalface. It’s the launch of their new Patreon platform, and they are in content ‘crunch’ mode as they put the finishing touches in place. An additional platform for extra content, their fans will still be able to access The Chip Race, The Lock In, and other content as usual, with the added benefit of a subscription sign-up for Patreon fans who want more.

I interrupt their preparations and come out firing, asking whether that disagreement with the World Poker Tour’s hiring of Ren Lin as an ambassador pushed them out of the door at WPT, leading directly to them taking content matters into their own hands.

I think it certainly spurred it on, says Dara. There is a popular misconception out there, which I didn’t realize would be there when we announced this, that some people think we’re moving everything behind a paywall, which we’re not.

The show will continue to be free, and we’ll do all the stuff that we used to do. That’s all continuing. This is basically bonus content. We’re going to do roughly an hour extra a week, spread over three to five episodes.

The added content is aimed at people who want a more regular fix of the two Irish poker legends or want to support the show. The Chip Race rightly won awards for its groundbreaking style of poker podcasting. As Dara explains to me, the show took around 26 hours to produce, so sponsorship was a necessity.

As much as we love it, we couldn’t justify doing it for free – it just takes up too much of our time. We hadn’t really thought about the Patreon route, and we thought we were going to be with WPT Global at least until the end of May.

While we were not completely dependent on a sponsor to keep the show going, we were very, very lucky in the sense that a bunch of different people came to us almost immediately after we split from WPT Global.

Dara and David explain that after they departed WPT Global, the Irish Open agreed to sponsor a couple of episodes to tide the pair over to the next sponsor, something they – and The Chip Race fans – appreciate hugely.

We’re very grateful to JP and Paul for that, to allow us to stay on the air, says Dara. It made us think, in a year or two what would happen if we weren’t able to find a sponsor for the main show?

The idea of Patreon is that it gets us away from depending particularly on a sponsor. We could reach a situation where Patreon is doing well enough on its own that we wouldn’t need a sponsor. We’d still be able to keep the show going and that’s our main priority.

For the Fans

As Dara admits, the two of them are ‘very lucky’ to have what both men agree is an incredibly loyal fan base. Every show the pair put out gets between 20,000 and 25,000 listens, making them a lucrative proposition for potential sponsors in the competitive space of poker podcasts.

David Lappin puts a lot of their appeal, output-wise, down to their unique voice.

Our independent voices are what underpin our being able to stay. It was more complicated than that with WPT, but a big part of it was that we were going to say what we really thought, and the brand that sponsored us wasn’t going to like it in that particular instance [of hiring Ren Lin]. It’s [about] the show staying independent-minded as much as it possibly can under the umbrella of a company.

David says that they would always ‘shine a bit of extra love’ on any sponsor’s promotions, understanding that it is the trade-off. But in terms of the editorial direction of the show’s content, both Dara and David would never give up that independence because their audience would reject us quite quickly if they did.

We shoot from the hips, and because we give our genuine takes, we recognized down the years that fewer and fewer brands would probably work with us, and we’ve narrowed the fields down to basically just a few. We’re very optimistic that our next deal will be a very fruitful one for both sides, but we’re realistic.

The life cycle of any independent voice in entertainment is often the same. That unique voice rises up, gets attention, and attracts both plaudits and sponsorship or advertising from major operators. If the entertainment was a Hollywood actor, that rise can often be followed by a drop off as that independent voice clashes with the mainstream, making the artist less appealing and the unique voice returns.

That analogy works mostly, but there’s one difference, which is that we will have our biggest audience when we’re being most independent-minded, says David.

We will get the biggest number of listens to a show where people know in the topical segment we were hard on hidden rake fees, or when we have a really interesting second guest who no one’s heard of before, and we give them an interrogatory interview.

Pushing for Patreon

Dara and David first started working together almost a decade ago when they teamed up for Unibet. The Chip Race grew in popularity, and their most controversial episodes were the best received – by their new sponsor as well as poker fans.

We took a pop at PokerStars after they ran a very bad live event at Barcelona, and we basically just put the recreational perspective, says Dara. It went viral, it caused a big stir in the industry, and that’s what actually got Unibet interested in us.

We were very lucky in that the person we were working for, David Pomroy, completely understood the importance of us remaining independent. We were really lucky with Unibet down the years; they almost never interfered with the show, they understood that if we were just interviewing the same four ambassadors over and over again, then there would be no audience.

Both Dara and David never looked to leave Unibet because the working relationship was so good. In the end, they only left because the company pivoted to French content.

There were times we could have left for more money when bigger brands came in, but that was never the motivation, says David. We wanted to keep it going as long as possible. We literally had to wait for them to kick us out before we left!

After the WPT Global row, Dara returned to a previous thought about Patreon, with David the one who needed convincing.

I’m always the person who’s like, no, just leave it as it is, come on, why rock the boat? says David.  The Chip Race is 100 minutes long, and the average episode has over 300 edit points at every 10 or 15 seconds of the show.

I wasn’t willing to polish the new thing that much. So, the question was, how nice can we make it? We were having a brainstorm, and realised the idea was ‘How do we do the same but different?’

Of course, I have to ask about the new content, and there are some major variations on the current theme.

Dara’s found a different way into the strategy.  We’ll be talking about hands, but we’ve inverted it a little bit. It’s going to be a new way of thinking about things for the audience, and that was important, because we didn’t want it to just be pieces that could have been used in the regular show.

What ‘Superfans’ Can Expect

The audience who will be willing to pay for extra content from the guys are probably self-selectively willing to indulge them, and Dara agrees that their subscribers will likely be ‘superfans’.

There’s always a difference between what super fans want and what the mass public wants. David Bowie went off the rails in the 1990s in his concerts because he was listening to the 200 active internet fans who all wanted songs he’d never played live before and hated all the hits. Because he listened to those people too much, he completely went off the rails.

If the Chip Race has mainstream appeal, then Patreon is going to be like the bonus content on a special edition DVD years ago – those extras that fans can’t find anywhere else.  

Too hot for the actual show, David says. We might get a bit extra controversial or spicy on things that we’re passionate about. I think The Lock-In becomes our vehicle for that sometimes because it’s more topical, but I think we have more room for stories that fall through the cracks.

When Dara suggested the idea to David, it was ‘completely and utterly shot down immediately’.

I was just annoying him even bringing it up. To give credit where it’s due, this was not my idea. A friend of mine, Lorena, who did our socials before WPT Global, came to me with this idea. I knew David was going to be a tough sell, and he was – he didn’t understand even what Patreon was at the start.

The thing is, they’re getting more than they asked for, says David. Most of the ideas that we’re starting with are actually things that people ask me all the time. An extra question to Jason Koon or my hot take on a topic.

The main selling point of Only Friends used to be how quickly they could respond, and lots of people come to me down the years and say, ‘Why don’t you guys do the same?’ We have a show that comes out every two or three weeks.

We can’t just suddenly rustle together a show because something big happened. We still have to go through the entire process of getting guests, doing strategy, all that stuff, but this allows us to respond really quickly.

There will be a community board where fans can make suggestions for future episodes, tell the guys what they like or don’t like. As Dara says, the landscape of poker changes very often.

We thought we’d all be playing 45-man tournaments at Full Tilt Poker for the rest of our lives. Wind forward a few years, and Full Tilt isn’t even there anymore, and 45-player tournaments don’t exist online. You have to be ready to embrace change; otherwise, you will just disappear.

The WSOP and “Devalued” Bracelets

Before The Chip Race was out there, Dara came second in a WSOP bracelet event to Upeshka DaSilva. Coming so close to gold, he was desperate to get over the line soon after. Over a decade later, that still hasn’t happened, but the pair put that down to the increase in the number of bracelet events, which they believe has diluted their appeal to them personally.

I think there’s no doubt that the bracelet has been devalued, says Dara. I never thought I’d say that, because my biggest ambition in poker was always to win a bracelet. About a year after coming second to Pesh, it did kind of hit me that maybe it was the closest I’ll ever come.

Hope sprang eternal for Dara, who returned to Vegas every year, focusing his attention on bracelet events above all others. Fast forward to 2026, and he isn’t sure that he’ll be attending the festival in any form.

David and I are optimistically hoping maybe this Patreon will just be an extra one to two hours a week, but I’m sure it will take more time than that, says Dara. One of the fundamental principles of planning is that everything always goes over time and over budget. We are committed to Patreon and keeping this going for the foreseeable future.

Both Dara and David have other commitments, making the WSOP difficult to prioritise.

I remember Niall Farrell saying a few years ago that he envisioned a future where there was going to be a $50 unlimited re-entry bracelet event with tables in the parking lot. We haven’t quite reached that yet, but I think we’re heading in that direction, says Dara.

The bracelet just doesn’t hold the same allure to me. When I made that final table back in 2015 and got back to Ireland, that was when I realized what a big deal it was. People had watched it on the screens in poker clubs all over the country. They showed me photos of them watching intheir local poker club because they put it on the screen.

Everything got moved behind a paywall. You don’t have that sort of communal experience anymore when people make a final table. Irish players have made final tables and won bracelets in recent years – people haven’t even noticed.

Despite once living in America, David waited until 2017 before being cajoled into attending the WSOP by Dara.

He said ‘Come on, you actually would enjoy it. It’s not as bad as you think. Come on, we’ll go out there, we’ll share a room together, we’ll have a bit of fun for a couple of weeks. Just do the Main Event and the week around it. Don’t go out for a month like I do, turn it into almost like a regular poker trip. And I was like, ‘I’ll f**king hate that place. It sounds like my idea of hell.’

Despite this initial trepidation about going to Sin City, David says he enjoyed it more than he thought he would.

I was lucky enough to have a couple of deep runs in the Main, which are highlights of my career, because there’s kind of nothing like Day 5 of the Main. Just actually being able to see the room full of people left in the tournament, as opposed to being this abstract thing, was actually really good crack.

David admits that while he doesn’t care too much about trophies, he remains in profit after his time in Vegas over the years and hasn’t travelled back there in some time.

I haven’t played poker in Vegas for nearly two years now, a year and to go along with what Dara said, I’m much more interested in the other projects we’re doing, and I can easily find my poker in Europe. There’s plenty to choose from.

That same ethic is what should put superfans of The Chip Race in hog’s heaven over the coming weeks, as the lid is blown on several explosive conversations. Dara and David have already put up their unedited thoughts on the Ren Lin situation and their acrimonious exit from the World Poker Tour via their Patreon site.

After many years in the game, the fun may just be beginning for the award-winning players behind The Chip Race.

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