Quote:
Originally Posted by matrixmoney
I want to put focus back onto my question regarding new sites outside of the US that allows US Players. I think we've extensively covered that launching within the US has clear and difficult barriers. But what about outside the US? How can ACR and Bovada/Ignition keep new sites from outside the us that allow us players from competing?
I think people (including myself) have laid out the reasons. Either you are not reading the responses or you just don't believe them. Lets say you have the funding to start a site and you are in some Caribbean country. Ok, how are you going to process payments? As mentioned earlier, ACR and others are constantly changing processors to stay one step ahead of regulators. Back in the day, sites like fulltilt had this problem as well. I believe it was published in one of the post black friday reports or with the Howard Lederer interview, that fulltilt lost millions of dollars because it couldnt process payments. The idea that crypto currency can fill the void (at least at this time) is just not realistic. You are not going to get large amounts of people buying and selling crypto so they can deposit $100 on a site. Now maybe in the distant future, when (and if) these things are mainstream, it could happen.
Second, as I stated before, if my recollection is correct, on black friday, the main poker sites were just simply shut down. The DoJ worked with ISP's (I believe) and blocked these sites in the United States. So any site that gets large again, would be risking this same scenario, so the risk may not be large enough for the reward.
Third, you need (for the most part) your entire operation to be located in this Caribbean country. So all your security people, programmers, software engineers, etc. I don't have any idea how many people it takes to run a site like party or pokerstars, but I imagine it is more than just a few people.
Fourth, the marketing aspect. Back in the day sites like party, fulltilt, and pokerstars, were constantly advertising to build their brands. They were in all the poker magazines, all over TV, had large social media presences (when that became a thing). When is the last time you saw an advertisement for ACR? I am pretty positive that their media spend is a small fraction of what these other sites did. Now I don't know exactly why they don't spend more. Not sure if media outlets won't accept their advertising because it is technically "illegal" to operate a site for Americans. Maybe ACR is just cheap, i'm really not sure. But the other sites spent tens of millions of dollars to get their name out there.
Finally, in your response, you say you understand it is difficult to launch inside the U.S., but not outside of the country. You do realize that all the poker sites from back in the day were launched outside of the U.S. correct? I think fulltilt had some kind of operations in the U.S., but their servers and all that stuff were outside. There really haven't been any sites that have actually launched in the U.S. (outside maybe the regulated ones in the U.S. now)
Last edited by Fletch F. Fletch; 08-09-2018 at 11:44 AM.