Do you as CEO feel that your site and/or Merge would be eligible to enter the US market if it were open, even as other sites accepting US players are being shut down by the FBI? In other words, it seems from the outside looking in that Merge is selling out now (and gaining) but would be screwed if regulation happens. Is there a plan for a regulated US environment or is it a wait and see situation?

My thoughts are regulated markets are better than grey ones; if you look at something like zynga poker, because they can use a mass medium like facebook, the level of volume they can get is just incredible. So what if 99.98% of players on Facebook can't play poker worth their lives, they are enjoying it because there are so many other players that can't play worth their lives- and in many respects that is the joy of the mass market which only can come from a regulated market.

Now in the case of PS or FPT or UB, what would be their reasoning to negotiate with the authorities and pay out players? I think in the case of PS, just my opinion of course, as they plead non-guilty, they clearly would like to get back into the US market when it is regulated. And that was the same as Party why they let their founder to just take the beat down (again, just my opinion on it).

But in the case of Hero, I'll say that we were open to all markets even before the past events, although we don't actually market or target all markets, we have just continued as is. But I get what you mean by selling out in the possible context of 'short term gain verse long term', but to put this into context: would be fair to say that when PS/FTP/UB were still in the market when Party left, that they were selling out as well? I can't count the number of conversations that started with...'party were a bunch a ******s to leave, they should have gone back to private and re-entered the market..blah blah..'. But from a real corporate understanding: who knows, may they did want to and considered it, but obviously they couldn't even if they wanted to because...the DOJ had them in the crosshairs.

No one will say that this is a simple strategic consideration, it becomes simple when they are only forced into a single rational option as in the case of Party, and in much the same what what recently played out (honestly I have no strategic understanding of the logic behind what UB/AP is doing and I seriously know my trade-I just can't mention them further in a strategic context cause it doesn't make any sense...). But when you have the option like what PS/FTP had you need to constantly weigh things on a number of different levels and proceed that way.

I think at some point, they stopped doing that - not to take away anything from those two companies - hands down I don't think there is a better poker company that ever was and possibly ever will be and continues to be than Stars-but on a strategic level, it's what I see. And I am more than professionally able to observe that; I won't get into the actual instances but they are obvious in retrospect. But what were the intent of those land based partnerships though, definitely for regulation. So here is the question that wrestle with me every moment of the day, and its not about what is going on right now.

Knowing what you know now, and given the chance to go back in time to 2006, would you have recommended PS/FTP to repeat their strategic choices up to about 2009? I say 2009 because after that I think both companies start to lose strategic perspective - (and what was I doing at the time not to advise differently? Locked away in the farthest reaches of the poker realm in a 5 star hotel outpost in Asia lol).

The moment I figure that one out, you'll know where I stand on the subject, but as you can see, how many, simply an astounding number of considerations there are, the pluses and minuses and the still pending ramifications?

I'll end with this though, and its personal- my sponsored pros, I don't put them out there, I could splash their faces on these banners and ask them to post on forums with some happy comments about poker to just get something out there. But all my pros, have my deepest respect because when I asked them to be a pro for Hero, they said yes and had faith in me as a CEO.

And I specifically chose them because none of them needed poker sponsorship, they had their earnings and place enough, and I let them play wherever they want. The main this was for me though, if these guys say, 'Dave you can do it' then I know they aren't kissing my ass but really think, ok, he can take on this job and make it work. You'd be surprised how many times I ask my pros for their initial assessment when it comes to just pure objective calculation of results before I sort my own holistic conclusion (yes guys it is possible to make a conclusion on other than EV)...

I'm not a poker player, I suck, but I know enough to know that I really do suck and I may be the CEO, but they constantly remind me how dumb I am at poker (non-intentionally most of the time as I try to be buddy buddy and engage in some poker talk once in a while-but they humour me most of the time). And so whatever the course the business takes, I would never risk their reputations for the company, as ultimately, they are a constant reminder to me of my main task,which to look after all our players who are with Hero and that includes keeping them out of traumatic shock...

I don't know if that is a kinda bull**** thing to say especially when you do need to navigate through rough waters and you say, 'don't worry boys, we're all gonna go home together, no one gets left behind.' But I think what comes with that is, I will put myself out there first.

Cheers,
Dave Jung

Hero Poker CEO,

I like the look of your site, I am from Australia, and looking for a Merge room to set up a Rakeback account before June 1st.

As an Australian can I set up a Real Money Poker Account with Rakeback before the deadline.

BigAl,

Do you have any plans to encourage/force/threaten Merge to improve their software? I would anticipate that this is going to happen because its likely increased rake will support some improvements but based on my very extensive and long experience watching poker rooms succeed and fail, it boggles my mind how little effort most poker operators put into improving the user experience. Though Stars and Full Tilt had great marketing, their software is what put them over the top IMHO (especially Stars who's tournament software was the first and best software by far and it wasn't close). Party Poker spent a great deal of time improving their software as well (many us remember the days when they were growing so fast their servers couldn't keep up, but they did what they needed to do to advance their software to become #1 pre-UIEGA).

You can look at the RPM thread for lots of comments about the software. Personally, I believe the main problem rests in the fact that its based on Flash, which limits its capabilities.

Hi BigAl, actually you may be able to set up the account but wouldn't be able to play or deposit, but I think it would be set up as RB account through the link,
if you'd like to try then PM your username and at least the system would be holding your ID.

But other than that, you are likely to have to wait unless you suddenly became a kiwi and flew back down under afterwards, and, I'd understand cause you'd have returned to your sensibilities or had more than enough sheep love to last you your entire life.

Btw I use to play national level Union in Korea, most my old mates are from the Southern Hemisphere. Cheers.

It looks like you are doing special promotions for americans and austalians. Will there also be something for europeans?

More thoughts later....wanted to ask about the vip thing which is pretty confusing. If I'm understandin correctly the distinction between divisions and levels; a player gets 46 tournament tickets for.his first 50 VIP points? That seems strange to me but it says on the site that you get a new ticket for each level (not division). Can you clarify?

Just want to make sure I am understanding the bit about cash stuff for each division vs tournament stuff for each level.

Will you be offering referral rewards?

It seems you have a sound business plan/model and have planned well into the future. Moving forward, do you ever have plans/aspirations of becoming an independant Room/Network? If you are unable to comment on this, then I completely understand.

Edit: With the changes on June 1st, do you plan to change your Rewards system? If so can you comment on what changes may be in the works post June 1st?

BTW, I like what I've seen so far from Hero Poker ITT.

If I had rakeback on another merge skin does this mean I cannot get it on yours?

Can you have rakeback at multiple sites on merge. I signed up through Carbon but have been underwhelmed so far.

Also want to know about this.

+1. I have requested rakeback on rpm, but have not heard anything more of it in weeks, even after a second inquiry. I'd like to know if I could play here with rakeback.

Guys, the way I remember it is you can switch skins and still have RB but you need to have 4 months (?) of inactivity at the site. I also think this is a network policy so you can probably find the exact answer from any Merge skins thread or even better use live support, as long as live support is not the type to pass off any RB questions to some affiliate email address. This does happen on other networks.

What I do know for sure is that I have an account at GR88 that I've never played on and never deposited and it's over 6 months old. I have RB there and was told I can sign up at any other skin and get RB. So if you have an account with similar criteria as mine, I can confirm that you're good to go but for more specific details it might be best to use live support and even then I'd contact both the site you are leaving and the site you are joining to confirm.

What is kind of a breath of fresh air, is how this network handles affiliate/RB issues. Coming from FTP it was once your tagged your tagged and you had little to no choice (only "choice" was that they later introduced an in-house RB program for ppl who were not tagged) but this network seems to have more relaxed restrictions and gives their players at least some choice and ability to change their mind/direction.

The way I understand it, yes you get a ticket for each of those VIP levels. But the amount of VPP on the chart isn't cumulative. So it would take 1 point to reach level 1, two more points to reach level 2 (so a sum of 3), etc. So to reach level 50, it would take 1275 VPP. (∑x from x=1 to 50)

What I'm doing is having my Lock Poker account deleted, I'll let everyone ITT know if this solves the problem as I've spoken the David and even he isn't 100% sure.

nofx - The rakeback gap has to be 60 days since last play on the previous RB site...not 4 months.




If that's the case then that's not terribly well communicated. It seems likely though since it would just be freaking weird to give 46 tourney tickets for your first 50 points.

Value isn't so hot with the continued stretching past 5k and 10k points though. I can't get rakeback there anyway since I'm already on Lock. But I'll continue to keep an eye on this site to see if it's worth my while in the future if they change things somewhat.

I really doubt it but I guess you never know.

If you could do this then there would be a lot more post-signup "shopping around." Kind of defeats the purpose of the 60 day "no play" policy that they have of getting RB elsewhere.

"Whoa, carbon is having a great promo this month that is attractive to me. I'll just cancel my RPM account and get RB there for a month. And then I'll cancel my Carbon account after a month and get RB at whatever new skin I decided has the best promo for that month."

#1, you are absolutely correct, with no question about it. You have no idea how much more critical than I of general poker software than most players and being from Stars, I use to feel such pain when I looked at even FTP software back in the day. Although nowadays I would say it is debatable which one is truly better.

That being said, I did pick Merge back in August because they were the best out there and after regularly visiting their office and playing Starcraft 2 after hours on Lan with their CTO and programmers, I give them the sufficiently nerdy thumbs up. But then why is it like this, if this is clearly the most important aspect of a room and a key success factor in actually making it big.

CONTEXT OF THE CRAPPER
I think what people don't realize is how complex the poker client is because of a couple of aspects: security and scalability. You'd think the main focus would be 'playability/user experience', but it's not, it is actually stability and consistency of game play (preventing disconnections and screwing up game play with funky graphics). Which is pretty much pressured by the scalability due to the multi tabling aspect and the ability to play against everyone on the entire network.

Whereas most multi player games are set up in a series network- meaning you can only play against x number of players at one time, and when the network wants to grow, they just stick on a new server, think zynga poker, one table with just x number of players possible per server. Whereas with a poker real money client, its more like a google situation where they add to the the capability of the central processing, but its not such a smooth process. Or at least it wasn't (and please forgive me if I'm not using the right terminologies, I just know it enough to make sense of it), but nowadays that issue is largely solved with most networks. But if you remember the very early days, there were some poker clients when they hit 5000 users the 1st user would get kicked off when a new user came on, while nothing is that overt anymore, it still is an issue.

Now to further complicate things; the poker client is set up with different API for different payment solutions etc, but its not like you have just one payment solution, these are constantly also being tweaked upgraded and changed. To add the fact that the client is live and you have new network partners coming on and its pretty much a cluster**** where everyone at this point knows what to change, but there simply isn't the time or space to make these really important changes.

Trust me these guys are not dumb, they know what to change, but don't get a chance to do so, cause if you only do it half ass and people start popping off the network, then you've just screwed yourselves even more.

So most client architecture was actually made with inherent limitations (due to language, initial scope etc), but sites didn't know this until they hit those limitations, so there are two options: build a new client from scratch or build the exact same client in a different language. I know of a couple of sites that did the former and basically took another 8 months to debug it when it was already live. And Merge which opted to do the later and make a client which was scalable and stable, but was still looking like it had zero changes to its user experience and which was true.

So that is the context, so where is this going?
You should know, when this client was being reprogrammed, most of the comments from twoplustwo were researched and documented to design a fully upgraded client and this is different from updated, I mean some serious changes are coming. And what is good about this is that, when the changes come, because now Meger understood the scope, there can be major add ons of functionality/player experience etc.

When?
Well I can't say when exactly because expectations being what they are in software development, everyone gets disappointed on time lines, but I would say its so not so far off, definitely before the end of the year and from what I've seen of the design and proposed functionality with my meetings with the CTO, I'm very happy with the potential. I even got a couple of my pros to write out some issues that put them on tilt and guess what, they were already covered when I brought them up with the CTO and twoplustwo probably was the main resource for the functionality.

But I'll say this, more frustrated than anyone are the programmers and tech guys who completely know what is wrong, but due to number of add ons etc and what is the development pipeline for security and stability issues, can't ever getting around to scratching their functionality itches. It was the correct executive decision for Merge to remake the client in a language that was suitable for the now expected levels of security, scalability and functionality.

I'm gonna to come out right and say it clearly, from my professional option, Merge's new client will be at least as good as Stars circa 2008, now I say that to manage expectation, but obvious, they are aiming higher to jump a functionality/user experience generation here. And myself and the CEO have a very good and mutually respectful relationship and while there is no favoritism, I do make an effort to visit the main offices at least once every 2.5 months or so, and we do talk a lot of shop because of my background is not at the start-up level but at the level that Merge obviously had ambitions for. And of course I give the staff a beat down in SC2 as well when I visit. But to be serious for moment, it is no coincidence that it is Merge that has been growing for this past year, even before the recent issues. But I do also fear that the rapid growth may delay the upgrade, but when it comes, and it will come, I will party like it is 1999 again.

I would try to get confirmation before deleting my account or you may end up stuck without RB at all.

Don't you think you guys are spoiled enough in Europe right now considering the situation =). We will be engaging in general international promotions through support the network's objectives and we likely will launch national leaderboards for each European country which we feel we can do some advertisement in opposed to working with affiliates. Not that affiliates are not good, they are, but Hero is more interested in having advertising relationships. But our main promotions in Europe will be through supporting e-sports tournaments such as SC2 before the years end.

I'm not going to play on Lock, I have money on Hero, so either I get rakeback on Hero or I won't play much on Merge basically.


I doubt they would let you make a new account once you deleted one, but also the skins aren't very keen on letting you delete an account at all, the reason they let me so easily is I had only played freerolls on Lock so they couldn't care less about me.

Just to make it as straightforward as possible because a lot of what I am doing with Hero is really new and not the industry norm from our 300 free roll to our 300 level system.

1. There are 300 levels in total. Each level requires a certain number of VIP points to make it to the next level, so level 1 requires 1 VIP, level 2 requires 2 VIP, etc.

2. The rate of leveling through these levels is relatively quick from levels 1-100, but after that, the requirements for VIP points become higher to hit the next level.

The best way to think about this all is like World of Warcraft, or AD&D or DOTA. As you level up in experience (VIP points) you get a new level, but the higher the level, the more experience is required to hit the next level. And when you hit the next level, you usually get some new 'skill' point which you can use to make your hero stronger.

3. In this case, what makes your Hero strong is that you get issues a tournament ticket EVERY TIME you hit a new level. So the amount the tournament ticket is usually the same throughout certain stretches/ranges of numbers. These ranges are called: Divisions or 'Classes' if we use the WOW terminology.


So if you are a Farmer you get a .30 ticket ever time you hit a new level from level 4 to 24 (so 20 x $0.30 tickets for that level.

If you are are a 'Gladiator' Class which starts at level 200-224, you get a $10 sitngo ticket for every level you complete within the Gladiator Class, so you gain a level: you get a $10 ticket, gain another, $10 ticket, etc.

Okay, Clear as mud?

Lets make it even more fun and complicated.
Every time you hit a new class, you get an instant cash amount and a cash bonus amount that has a play through (think free cash and reload cash), cause it s a big deal when you move up. Its like being promoted. So when you hit that level, you get the Award. SO JUST WHEN YOU FIRST HIT THE CLASS, ie. level 50, 100, 150, 200, 250

So this continues so and so forth until you hit level 300, when you get massive bonuses that keep reloading every time to hit the same number. So it's Hero's version of Super Nova Elite, except:

1. The overall VIP system was designed to encourage new players
2. The VIP system is pretty generous at the beginining as it assumes that you will continue to play, so even mirco stakes players can feel like they are getting something always while mass grinders will blow through the initial levels.
3.To be an Elite Spartan, may not give as massive return as a SNE, but throughout the entire process you've been rewarded generously, so it probably evens out to about the same.

THE BOUTIQUE ASPECT
So lets complicate this further shall we?
As a boutique site, since players are grouped into different classes, our objective is to provide Arena tournaments within the Classes as a further reward, so basically the 'Farmer Markets monthly freeroll for $100' or the 'Centurions Barracks plus EV tournament for +3k added to prize pool' etc.
Now how are these further divisions bonus tournaments calculated, basically, in what our players want. So if we have 10 Spartans and they say, 'Dave, we play hard for your fat corporate ass, buy us a rolex and let us play for it'. Then I waddle to my screen, see how much is in the budget that month as a set percentage of the players total contribution as Spartans, and say. 'Ok, I can either put up a half gold submariner or a deep sea diver, which one guys?' They argue a bit and go for the bling and I set up a tournament and they fight for the watch and end up chopping it and I send 3 of them the cash equivalent instead. Or so how this entire boutique thing is envisioned to work out as and is going to be instituted by September.


MOVING FORWARD
So over the last couple of months, I noticed that cash game players don't care about tournament tickets whatsoever, so we will be launching a 'cash game 300 system' as well, exactly the same but it will give out cash rebates instead of tournament tickets so players can choose to specialize as a 'cash game player' or 'tournament player'.

CONCLUSION:
Yes, I did think of this myself and yes I am a really uber geek/nerd actually, but I think to anyone who players a character based role playing game they will get it instinctively. For poker players who are not use to such progressive rewards system, may think it is quite complicated, but actually is it extremely transparent and that is something I really wanted, but once you get into it, you'll always note your progress.

This will be revised on the website for further clarity and the 'cash game specialist VIP system' will be release by mid-next week as well and I'm sure I completely lost another half of you on this. Ah, business talk I'm good at, nerd talk, the nerd takes over. If you just play it will automatically make sense.

Again: the link to the Hero Poker rewards page, I promise by end of next week it will have a great deal more clarity, apologies for my nerdiness as I look at it and it makes perfect sense, but when I read what I write, the nerdiness assumes too much. lol. http://www.heropoker.com/en/experience/rewards

PM sent with questions, hope you sign back on today.

Sorry, not at the moment, but we will look into later as we may implement an invite system some time in the future for special events (aka open house) where you may be able to get some additional benefits from.