Sweet pokerstars with a little less rake and a lot less fish. Sign me up.

Why would you want less fish?

Sage donkey

I respect your passion but deplore your ability to listen to what others have been trying to help you understand .

Quick question for you.

Let's say that you decided that NJ was an important market for your PokerUtopia.com to operate in.

Please tell me what you think the TIME and COSTS would be for you to get the company, your 40-50 owners , additional investors, company officers licensed in NJ?

Now please answer the exact same question for Nevada.

Now please answer the same question for each and every country you plan to accept bets from.

You're talking about building a site for pros and hoping the fish will join later. GL.

I have said at least 5 times ITT that this is what a feasibility study is for.


It is a long thread granted, but I have explained how weaker players will also be on the site/procured etc, it is all ITT. And I have never said that it is building a site for pros, this is your incorrect interpretation.

Ok. I will leave you with this last suggestion.

Do that part of your feezzeebility study first.

I suspect that if there was a gap in the market for a "Player-friendly version of Pokerstars", a bunch of disgruntled Rational Group employees and ex-employees would be setting up a rival company, since those are the people who actually know how to run a player-friendly poker site. A few people have left Stars over the years. I don't see them re-entering a dying industry any time soon.
A start-up that truly rivals AmayaStars in 2015-6 is basically a non-starter. A player-funded site seems about as likely to happen as a bunch of cows saying "**** you, Walmart! We're gonna build our own dairy farms".

A point you may be missing is a simple one: if you take even 5k unhappy players from PS you won't get to top 30 poker network list for traffic.

Big MTT garantee are not so easy to reach, are you think about a site with S&G and MTT only?

well in 2-4 years when pokerutopia.com finally gets licensed and launches you are correct. but there are all those other existing sites that might have the same idea and have the advantage of already completing the feeeeezzeebility study.

every time someone reads this thread and thinks any of this is possible a puppy dies somewhere.

don't kill puppies.

lol

The site would have cash games too and as many poker variants as possible.

So there would be multiple reasons why the site would be attractive to all players, all on top of the fact that on day 1 there is a guarantee of traffic by investors themselves who want to earn their investment money back through rake back concessions and whom are keen for the company to be successful because they own equity in it.

Also in a business model where you have a significant high number of investors who are also active on the web site your marketing impact is automatically much higher.

One of many examples is social media.

So for example when Party Poker tweet a forthcoming comp or promotion it will reach all of their followers but they won't particularly get many retweets, whereas if this happened in the business model I am suggesting, anyone who is a follower who is also a shareholder will retweet because they are financially interested in the share price and the success of the company.

It is fair enough that most people ITT are sceptical or pessimistic about the possibility of what I suggest but I feel one has to look at all of the positive and neutral factors as well as the negatives, so if a list of everything, positive, negative and neutral was made about the idea, it would give a clearer picture.

Positive:

1. Your idea, in your mind, gives professional poker players a better alternative to pokerstars.
2. You took the initiative to post your idea in a public forum.

Neutral:

Negative -

1. Issues relating to investment, legal compliance, security, and operating expenses are too many to list
2. If you have an employee owned poker site, you will have no recreational traffic. I can see it now - Oraclepoker.com, where the pro's can see your cards before they are dealt.
3. Recreational players do not care about most of your idea. They only care about whether or not they can buy in, find a game quickly and easily, not be cheated, and cash out if they get lucky.

Would rather make a tournament-only poker site and copy the DFS business model because tournament Texas Hold'em is considered a skill game. Pool players in all DFS friendly locations without a gambling license and accept PayPal. Sell to FD/DK for a shipload after not being arrested and shutdown for operating and promoting gambling by running said business.

I think you're overestimating the social media impact (though it would be better than starting totally from scratch) as well as how attractive having an exceptional high percentage of grinder/player/owners with heavy investments in the site would be to new members.

Why? I mean, I'm one of those less-skilled players and this doesn't sound particularly attractive to me. Maybe some reduced rake in exchange for fields of an extremely high class of top-level players who own and control the site?

just saw that. well played.

SageDonkey.

You are at least thinking about this stuff which puts you ahead of 98% of people in NVG, 94% of general public in the strat forums, and 85% of the thought leaders in the strat forums.

Take your creative energy and apply it to esports. Thats where the babillions will be made over the next decade.

Online poker as we all knew it went papoof when Isai put his name on the dotted line.

Why would A/PS (or anybody, really) make a major investment to help fund a potential competitor, a company whose policies would be constitutionally permanent (which I'm not sure is even a thing), their equity would not include voting rights, and many changes/decisions would be put to a general customer vote?

The answer is quite obvious. If you run a market leader capitalised at $4.5 Billion and a new competitor site that could be a long term threat to you is being built for say $20 Million then by investing let's say $5 Million in the fledgling new competitor's project you are hedging 25% of your long term risk from the competitor for a tiny amount of money in relation to your own company's value.

All investors who have invested in voting rights shares would have certain voting rights but an underlying constitution needs to be inbuilt from the outset, otherwise the values of the company and its ethos would be in danger of being eroded or lost all together.

You are also increasing the chances that the competitor successfully becomes a longterm threat.

It may well be in decline, but it is difficult to attribute how much of this is down to the general poker bubble bursting and Black Friday, and how much it is the fault of on line poker companies screwing things up as well as chasing a faster buck through introducing other gaming products.

My suggestion is a low risk enterprise in so far as that if the total investment required is <$20M that this is not a huge number of people required to invest relatively small pieces of money each to meet this figure, when a lot of the natural investors in such a venture would be poker players and poker industry people.

If the venture was well executed then the growth in the value of the company has a lot of potential upside.

Amaya I think paid about $4 Bn CAD for a company that already has huge revenue streams in place but what are the realistic chances of its stock (shares) being 10, 5 or even 3 times the value they are now in 5 years time? I would say low.

But when you start from a base of $20M clearly there is much more mathematical upside because most of your growth is yet to happen, and by starting a new business from scratch you can use all available data and knowledge that is already within the on line poker industry to design something that aims to be the best.

Sage-son

you have been downgraded

80% for NVG

50% for general in strat

5% for thought leaders in strat
(thats only 20 person group so your 5% is exactly one person which is @shipit2kg, since almost all are smarter than him… I'll give you that)

This is true, but only if they feel that if their investment hadn't been made that the offering would have been under subscribed, which is a chance that Amaya may not take.

The fact that we are even discussing this as a factor indicates that they may think about it either pre project build or afterwards when equity would still be available, and if they were to think about it post build then this would make an investment pre build more attractive to others, on the basis that Amaya or other investors might push the price up by buying equity post build.

Your original point was that they "could produce a substantial piece of any required investment" and now it isn't a required investment and Amaya's just buying stock shares or something? What difference does that make? My point was that an extra $5 million in funding would increase the chance that this new company would be successful, and success in this conversation means taking business away from Stars.

But anyway, no, the fact that you raised this as a possibility doesn't really indicate anything. Kind of like saying that $20 million is a low-risk investment.

Also, why can't an existing company (with funding and a cash/customer base) "use all available data and knowledge that is already within the on line poker industry to design something that aims to be the best." Stubbornness?

Well, a lot of people have already given you reasons why this won't work, but here's another I haven't seen mentioned in this thread -

If I'm a shareholder and somehow or another this thing totally works out and the size of the new site is equal to pokerstars...I'm going to start thinking wow, instead of earning a dividend check of $X/month, we could increase rake a little bit, still charge far less than pokerstars and my check will be $2X.

And then, the next month I'm going to think, hey, we are still quite a bit below what the market charges...why not raise the rake to only a little less than pokerstars. Then I'll get a check for $10X. And so on.

You seem to be counting on your investors being super altruistic and not liking money.

Any business has to charge competitive rates to be, well, competitive.

You are not only guilty of thinking negatively but you are also guilty of assuming that any person or group of people who run a business has a single train of thought of being as unfair to customers and consumers as they can and making as much money out of them as possible as quickly as possible.

There are some businesses that think like this, but there are also others that are not so short termist and whom want to build sustainable long term growth.

The business would be built to be sustainable whilst maintaining competitive rates and it has nothing whatsoever to do with altruism, it is just a sensible way of running a business.

So instead of (immorally in my opinion) luring people to a poker site to then shove casino games and the like under their noses, other revenue streams would be included/added/explored to maintain the viability and the growth of the business.

So please imagine that such a site would also be able to gain revenue from the subscription to poker training, books and merchandise, poker software, plus something which everybody on this thread so far has taken zero notice of, which is the integrated backing and staking feature which is also a source of revenue, as the house (the site) would be charging a very small fee for managing each backing and staking deal that is struck.

The actual structure of charges for this would be determined as part of the overall business plan, but most likely would be a very small deduction from the premium that the player is charging, as most players charge a premium, and if the backing is at face value then perhaps 2% or something like that.

There are other sources of poker related revenue that are possible, such as the live backing indemnity scheme that I have already mentioned.

How specifically is your backing scheme going to work? The house acting as some sort of middle between parties while taking a cut? The house to some extent guaranteeing the deals?

That all sounds a bit sketchy from the POV of somebody who might play on the site.

With all due respect you have totally missed the main USP of my whole idea which is that there would be a positive triple whammy effect of much of the investment being from players themselves.

a) It makes the money easier to raise because the investors would have a natural self interest in promoting the site and playing on it.

b) Because those who bought (rake back concession) equity will be further motivated to play on the site because it is a method of getting their equity investment back and results in a form of equity freeroll for them.

c) If well thought out and planned from the very start, the whole basis of the web site would be designed in such a way and include the features and characteristics that players want, because it is the players' input that would shape the business model.

So an existing company could not possibly achieve all of the above.