I see prizes right now are Amazon.com and Paypal. Is that working for Canada or just US right now?

Dean,

An advertising model can work, as requiring participants to view ads may fall short of "consideration" even if a player is winning real value prizes. The "free to play" model can be leveraged to massive participation, and underwrite prizes with ad revenues, but your set-up does not actually let "winners" own the "prizes" in their accounts:

"You understand that while you may "earn" or"win" Coins or Virtual Items in our Services, You do not legally "own" the Virtual Items and the amounts of Coins held do not refer to any credit balance of real currency or its equivalent. Any "virtual currency" balance shown in your Account does not constitute a real-world balance or reflect any stored value, but instead constitutes a measurement of the extent of your limited license."

https://www.biguglypoker.com/company/terms_of_service

So, 20,000 coins "would be about $20", but the "winners" do not actually own the prizes ?

An advertising model can legally reward free participants/players with real money prizes. How about you let players own the prizes they win ?

How do you otherwise draw an equivalency between coins on your site and USD ? How do players "win real money" if they don't own the prizes they "win"?

Are players allowed/required to cash out for USD/"real money" to get ownership of their prizes won ?

What your "winners" hold on your site or in their account is some license extension which you seemingly say lacks "a real world balance or stored value", not a USD equivalence.

We're not working ANYWHERE quite yet, the store will come online toward the end of beta hopefully in a few weeks. That said your coins are safe and aren't going anywhere so stay tuned for our announcement that the store is open.

When the store does open it will be available everywhere. Items will only be limited to where they're legally available (for example, Amazon might not do gift certs in the nation of SuchAndSuch) but to the extent we can we intend to treat all regions the same.

Thanks for asking,
Greg

Thanks!
We're part of that community too and we want to see it treated right.

Greg,

However "safe", BUP coins apparently have no real world value until and unless they are cashed out. This is just a beta test, correct ?

Why not fund a beta test prize pool, to secure testers' wins, and aim your cashier to draw from that pool so winners can get their prizes or at least test the cashier ? Surely there are some altcoins you could corral for that purpose.

This looks like some fly by night shop I would never give my info to. Lots of empty links, coming soon text, grammar issues, and offputting copy like:

"I want to play on my kindle e-reader, can I do that?

I want to be 6 inches taller. But that's probably not going to happen either."

It should be funny, but comes across as crass. If someone actually needed to ask this question, they'd need a real answer. If you deem that worthy of the response given, why even bother listing it?

Where are the game rules?

Well... we think it's funny. FAQs are boring, we want to have some fun with them.

But seriously, we're very fly-by-day. We're a small team working hard to do something new and exciting. If the occasional typo has found its way onto our site we will try to fix it. Please point them out to us!

As for giving us your info, we're not asking for any. Not really. Email, username, password. We literally can't ask for less and still run our site.

And as for the game rules... (runs to site to get URL)

Oh, whoops. Thanks for pointing that out, we'll get right on it! In the meantime; game rules are just good ol' poker rules. Standard hold'em. Tournament rules are gonna be posted soon but there's nothing out of the ordinary or shady in them. We've just been too busy writing code to write the rest of the FAQs. We won't leave beta without fleshing out the rest.

All that to say, Big Ugly Poker is new, not shady. We're just a half-dozen folk working night and day to bring something fun to the world. If you need us to be around awhile before you trust us that's fair, we'll be here. We're not going anywhere and we're happy to answer your questions or play a hand or two of poker with you.

But seriously, the FAQs were a good read and mildly humorous as well.

Excellent points that all deserve a thoughtful answer. I'll give it my best shot...

Before addressing the conversion or value of coins and cash and prizes, allow me a moment to articulate the basic premise of our site. Which is, everyone plays for free, and we share the revenue that the video ads generate with players in the form of prizes that are won in our poker tournaments. Ultimately, it is our hope that players will realize profit through their poker play that will eventually come in the form of either cash or products, such as direct paypal transfers, gift certs, hats t-shrts, etc.

So if I understand you correctly, you're asking or suggesting that we just hand out cash for winning tournaments. And that certainly could be done without jeopardizing the legal standing of the site. What defines gambling throughout the U.S. is whether or not a person can lose something of value based on the outcome of a future event. So long as we don't allow anyone to re-wager the reward from a tournament, then we should be safe. This is why we don't have ring games. And why we invented our new Play and Go tournament format (patent pending, naturally).

So why do we pay out tournament prizes with coins? Well there are a few reasons for this:

For one, if we were to pay out in cash, say USD, then we'd feel kind of obligated to transfer that money to you somehow. Which means we would have to set up bank transfers and potentially many other complicated payment processing solutions. What if someone won only $0.14 -- we couldn't efficiently process a payment that low. Or what if our players were from Canada or France? They probably would have a tough time receiving USD. By rewarding with our coins, we can offer other types of eventual payouts such as Euro, CAD, BTC, ETH, various gift certs, etc. via a purchase in our store.

Another reason to reward in coins is a lower level business decision related to an ever-fluctuating advertising rate that is highly sensitive to the region in the world where ads are shown. With coins as an intermediate payout from tournaments, we are able to manage this business risk to a certain degree.

There are legal reasons as well, which have to do with various state laws that hinge upon the type of prizes that are offered. Specifically, those that pay out consideration that has no real-world value outside the scope of our web site are treated differently than if we paid out in cash.

Lastly, there are accounting reasons that make for many a sleepless night for our accountants having to to with the liability of accrued coins from users who have abandoned the site. Coins provide solutions for that issue too.

Hopefully I have correctly understood and addressed your question and concerns. I'm glad you brought this up because we feel it's all very important that people know these sorts of things. If somehow I misunderstood what you were saying, please let me know and I'll try again.

Ultimately, what I do want everyone to know is that the coins you earn playing poker now and in the future can be spent in the store (when it goes live, hopefully at the end of Aug) and exchange them for something of considerable value in the form of cash, currency, or other goods. For a typical poker player, rather than depositing money every so often, we sincerely hope that they are able to withdraw money every so often. This would be a refreshing change of pace from the norm. Having worked for a very, very large online poker site in the past, I've seen that a majority of players tend to deposit and never withdraw. On our site, the opposite is the case. No player will ever deposit, and most will withdraw at some point.

Because we operate so efficiently, we intend to return half of our advertising revenue back to players in the form of prizes. We don't believe any other site can operate anywhere within 1 to 2 orders of magnitude of our level of efficiency and offer such a return. And if they can, then great, that'll be a good thing for the poker playing community.

One thing anyone who runs a web site knows... it's that customers are extremely reluctant to read anything. Based on some feedback we've received, we know lots of people don't even see the three large (blue/green/gold) instruction boxes in the lobby. So we have a fairly low expectation that anyone will dig into the help section.

That said, for those who do bravely wander into the content pages, we tried to balance accuracy with humor plus a touch of honesty so as keep the reader somewhat amused. And I'll take full responsibility for the kindle answer. That was my doing and I do wish I was six inches taller (I'm on the shorter end of the human male height spectrum).

Full disclosure, building a site like this is no easy feat. Doing it with (no joke) 1/100 of the staff of our competitors is even harder. So a few things on our site are not totally complete -- content, faqs, and help being some of them. This is due only to prioritization. And it's exactly why we're in a Beta release state right now, actively soliciting feedback (such as yours, thank you) and hunting down bugs. We expect that all of the content will be in place when we officially declare ourselves live.

Lastly, regarding your personal info, all we need from a player to get in the game are three things: email address, username, and password. Two of those are made up. So really, the only piece of real information we ask for is a verified email address -- which of course anyone can also generate through a free service if you want to be completely anonymous. No downloads, no software install, no deposits, no credit cards, nada. We try our darndest to make it as easy as possible to start playing, which we hope you do. And we welcome the feedback of everyone during this beta phase. It only helps us get better.

Half of the people in our company would prefer to abandon IE. I am not one of those. But it's a constant struggle to keep our software compatible with IE.

Don't get me wrong -- I am a YUGE fan of microsoft products. But I have to be honest, IE is really, really bad. I reluctantly gave up on it years ago (as did Microsoft). Many support libraries that we rely on find it very challenging to stay compatible too.

That said, signup should work on IE, but since we haven't tested it with IE in a while, it very well may have broken. We do know that our ad company's library won't work on IE. Ultimately I vow to support IE (10 or higher). But in the meantime, I recommend updating to a modern browser. Not just for our game, but the whole web will become a much better experience. I'm not just saying that to bash MS. I use their products religiously. Imho, IE is simply not compatible with modern web browsing.

If you think it's funny, that's what matters most...

You're not asking for signup info, but you or you're advertisers are definitely using cookie data. "Turn off ad plugin to play" Either way, where's the notice?

What's a play and go?

Busy writing code is not an excuse for poor copy and a lousy website. And this concept is not new, it was done prior to Black Friday by a well funded company with a much larger advertising pool and still failed to gain traction. Maybe you're the same guys at it again? Anyway, ads suck and only the bots on your site will inevitably tolerate them.

If your customer isn't going to read, why not make a video and replace all the text?

If you only care about the software, and feel like the information portal is a lower priority, why not have a simple landing page like every other app?

Are you using the fact that you have a lean development team as an advantage of your platform's efficiency or as a crutch for when things go wrong?

If you don't ask for information upfront, what data are you and your advertisers gathering from active players?

What matters most is feedback from our customers, so we will take what you said to heart. I will concede that you are correct when you say "busy writing code is no excuse for poor copy". Though I'm hoping you'll concede that it's not awful copy considering that it was actually written by the programmers! When we grow and have a full-fledged customer service department, we will strive to balance out our site communications.

Btw, having done it myself, it's super-incredibly tedious to write all that copy. Like inexplicably tedious. And it never seems to end. It saps the energy out of ya to try and come up with robust answers to unknown questions and issues.

Here's my offer... I promise we'll look into improving it in the future, taking your feedback into consideration. Will you promise to give our poker site a try and give us more honest feedback -- good or bad, so long as it's constructive we would greatly appreciate it.

For the record, we're not the same guys that tried this model before Black Friday. A few notable things have changed since then... ad revenue is much more lucrative, integration of video ads into web sites have come a long way, and we operate much, much cheaper than anyone else, so we are able to give away orders of magnitude more in prize payouts. Regardless of how much or little anyone wins, we feel it's a good alternative for free-to-play poker players and real-money players who tend to deposit more than they withdraw. For those who enjoy higher stakes real-money play, we are fans of other real-money sites for that too.

Btw, did I mention that the top prize in the PnG exceeds $80,000!? Of course, you'll be expected to watch about 3 minutes of ads per hour. But those ads become optional at level 10 and above.

Your efficiency comes from assigning marketing tasks to your programmers because writing copy and thoughtful faq's is tedious?

What's a png and is the $80k guaranteed right now?

The wrapping matters, so how would you rate the unboxing experience of your new app?

Why isn't watching an ad rewarded with coins like every other game of this type?

These are all very good suggestions, thank you. Here are some replies.

We plan to make many videos, we're working on them now.

We think our 'information portal' is very important, we're working hard to improve it even as we speak/type.

The fact that we are lean and mean is a double edged sword. It is an advantage in that we are very nimble and responsive. We've fixed a few issues in less than 5 minutes after having been made aware of them. It also means we don't have to use money to pay staff that we'd rather leave in the prize pool. On the other hand a small team can mean details take a while to get dialed in. So it's not a crutch, just an unfortunate reality. We don't make excuses, we just ask for some patience. It's why we say we're in beta.

This is a very valid and important question. Outside of game details (you are in game X with Y chips and you've earned Z coins) we only collect what you explicitly give us. Our current ad partner is a company called AppLixir. They gather very little data. Per their FAQ on privacy, "We take privacy very seriously. We don't collect any personal data from social APIs, such as names, contact info, etc. All aggregate metric data (gender, age, etc.) cannot be linked back to an individual."

Writing the FAQs is a pain, but it's important and by having our actually development team do the work we better assure the accuracy of that content. Who better than the person that actually wrote the code to speak to its functionality? And again, we could hire a copywriter, but that money would have to come out of the prize pool.

A Play and Go is an awesome new type of tournament in which you can come and go as you please. You amass chips through skilled play and move up the leaderboard and payout table. Stand up any time, sit back down any time with the same stack. You can even choose the level you play at based on your chip balance. It has quickly become our team's favorite way to play. It's a lot of fun.

And that $80k is guaranteed! If you can play your way up to that level you will win that amount. In practical terms, there aren't enough players on our site for you to get that level but there will be in time. In the interim it's worth noting that every prize on our site is guaranteed!

We feel that it's going well. You can't please everyone but in general people are having fun playing a new, free product with the understanding that we're in beta. The feedback we're getting has been very positive with the occasional thoughtful concern or critique (like yours!), which we sincerely appreciate.

We offer a variety of game styles. In our Play and Go every ad viewing is rewarded with a direct addition of chips to your stack which you can convert to coins by cashing out at your leisure. In a Sit and Go or a Scheduled Tournament the prize pool goes up with every ad viewing. (It's actually a lot of fun to be in the game and just watch the prize pool grow!) If you're in the money when the tournament is over you are rewarded in coins. We're unique in many ways and this is one of them. We don't want to reward ad viewing, we want to reward your poker skills.

We really appreciate your thoughts and input. Hopefully by the time we're out of beta we'll have addressed your concerns and we'll be able to see you at one of our tables having a good time.

Play and go, the cash game tournament with a guaranteed prize pool you are guaranteed to never win.

Hi btc:

While it’s certainly possible you’re correct, it’s my experience that “fly by night” operations don’t put the type of time and effort answering questions and participating in our website the way the Big Ugly team currently is. So, as time will tell how good this will be, I think it’s fair to say they’re off to a good start.

Best wishes,
Mason

In a PnG, not only can you take a break whenever you want, you can also end the tournament whenever you want (almost). The minimum cash out tier starts at 1,000 chips. So any time you acquire 1K chips or more, you're free to decide to end the tournament and claim your coins! You can cash out a portion of your chips and keep playing with your remainder, or you can cash out all of your chips and start the tournament again... free of charge of course.

Lots of players have already done exactly that. Bearing in mind that this site was launched just about exactly 24 hrs ago, players have already redeemed their chips for 3,164 coins (some of which are from conventional tournaments). That's just the prizes that have already been claimed. A quick scan of the leaderboard and I estimate there are 10,000-20,000 coins worth of tournament chips yet to be redeemed. Not too shabby for the first day of a site that was previously unknown 24 hours ago.

Back of the napkin... if we had as many players as poker stars, we'd be giving away about $7M per month!!!

It's illegal to correlate the guaranteed prize amount to the number of players participating in the tournament, even by disguising that with levels. It's either $80k guaranteed or it isn't.

Even though the prizepools are derived from advertising, this is still presumably a sweepstakes operation. It doesn't seem like compliance protocols have been established for that either.

Fly by night may be to harsh though. You guys seem willing to answer questions, so given the benefit of the doubt, you're well intentioned and poorly prepared.

Big Ugly Greg, you have your first dedicated forum critic/watchdog. There will be more. I am impressed with all the professional responses to each and every criticism.

Well, I forgot to watch the ads. Oh wait. I didn't see any. Had enough trouble keeping up with the free roll tournament. Might be why I missed them. Glad you have the note feature and color coding. And an hour and 50 minutes isn't bad for shipping it. Think I'll be back.

What are the system/browser requirements for this? I can't sign up (and thus, can't create my login) but I'm admittedly using a pretty old computer right now.

Hi Wilbury, the site works well on the latest version of Chrome. That would be your best bet.

Cheers

Digging this site so far!!

Is there an option for a four color deck? Havent looked very hard yet. Also coming back from watching an ad I had it like auto fold the first hand back?

*was just playing the 8/16 level in png. I noticed that raising from the SB gave me an option to raise to 31? Shouldnt the minimum raise be to 32 since the blinds are 8/16?

Thanks! Glad you like it, we do too.

We’re going to be offering four color cards soon. As for missing a hand due to an ad, we’re working on ways to avoid that. What I do is pre-watch my next ad after a pre-flop fold. You can do this when the timer shows the play icon in the top right. Then you’re never caught flat footed!