If it gets to the stage where there is an agreed road map then people such as yourselves and others would not be excluded from giving their own expert or knowledge based or experience based input into the key areas, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so, but to execute things in a totally professional businesslike way, official industry or business field experts, who can demonstrate that they are, would need to be assigned/hired to officially study and report back on each of the key areas.

To respond to a couple of your points: Multiple investors does not necessarily = multiple owners, in a legal sense. But again, this is one area that I have already thought of and that would need to be researched by an expert both from the gaming/poker application license point of view and from a fund raising and ultimate legal ownership and voting rights etc point of view of the company itself.

I don't disagree about e-sports but I would add that one would be competing with many, many other start ups, whereas with poker it would be one big project that it is unlikely that others would be trying to replicate.

The reason I believe this, regarding the lack of competition (Amaya aside), is that both the poker industry and player perception appears to be that Amaya are the Sonny Liston of on line poker providers and therefore are unbeatable...., well let's make ourselves the Cassius Clay in this situation.

Let's not kid ourselves though........ because the kind of project that I am proposing would be very complex and extremely involved, but I do believe that with the right planning and with the right people behind it and involved in it that it is possible.

The interesting thing for me about on line poker is that I believe that in comparison to financial trading, sports betting exchanges and various other on line trading activities, it is very under developed and in some aspects it is even below the level of development of some of the features of live poker.

Is it legal to open an esports room, which would basically be the equalivant of a poker room for gamers? Cash games, tournaments, food, booze, etc...

There is an answer to Pokerstars coming in 2016. Everything discussed in this thread has already been completed and the group putting it together is happy making 30M a year not 300M a month.

Don't worry wheels have been turning and Pokerstars in the last few months have shown kinks in the armor. Amaya is a public company driven to generate shareholder wealth. This group is private and will bring back a site for players with some new twists.

Poker players both regulars and recreational players will benefit from this new platform as the group is removing the greed from the model. Financials and infrastructure have already been prepared and if it is green lighted it will be a game changer.

The current business model for Esports is quite different from Online Poker.

Poker is funded by poker players.

Esports is funded by sponsors and viewers / fans.

But to answer your questions directly, I am not sure. But most I believe are looking at more like NFL than online poker.

Here is a documentary from a year ago. I suppose its gotten bigger since.

i totally agreed, we need big names to step in and do this project. Ansky get all the high stake players on board and set up it. I don't want to pay another 500k rake to greedstar anymore. I will be happy to invest a few thousand dollars

how this site will be different from all the others lol ?

So no public companies?

Seriously though, the way to do this is to buy out an existing family b&m bookies and expand it from there.

I think the niche will have to be Offering a site that focuses on highstakes games and marketing through that aspect, getting railbirds etc. Highstakes regulars are the ones that play themself all the time, without real limpy pimpy Fish, so the biggest issue is raising funds, and having enough integrity that highstakes players will move to the new site.

I was working on the assumption that Sage was planning on doing this as private company with hundreds of owners. In that, his idea is flawed from the very beginning as getting each and everyone one of these "owners" licensed would be impossible or near impossible in many important gaming jurisdictions.

Being a public company would solve the above as then only Officers/Directors and investors >5-10%(varies by jurisdiction) would need to get individual gaming licenses. I suggest the likelihood of this business idea floating an IPO or buying a public shell at about .08350%.

Buying an existing company is a good idea but wouldn't help as all the new owners would need to be licensed in that scenario as well

Seems like a terrible waste of money to me, especially since Amaya has a very good idea about what they're doing.

Holdem-X will save poker?

Amaya is systematically destroying the poker ecosystem. This group understands exactly what the challenge is and has a solution to combat it.

As players no one should be satisfied with the status quo and being conditioned that pokerstars is the only platform that will have the liquidity and popularity is a very naive viewpoint.

Financials have been crunched as well as development and a lot of these numbers that have been presented here are way off base and there is no reason why a site needs to make 600-700M a year profit. Think about that for a second. What if there was a platform that could operate at 10% of that and give back the rest.

The world is not full of greedy business men as much as people would like to believe. Understanding that a business takes both sides to keep it going is the premise of this new platform.

Is this actually in the works or is it just an idea?

It's in the works. Full plan built with investors reviewing

how much are you raising and at what valuation?

In the interest of discretion to our current offers I don't want to get into the actual numbers but let's just say for argument that we are running in the millions with a 2 year return on investment at 12x . These numbers have been vetted and built out into a 3 year forecast with all assumptions made.

I am not surprised at the response both from public and private messages.

As poker players many have been conditioned for far too long that pokerstars is the only site out there that can fill liquidity/processing/customer service requirements. There have been other sites that have come and gone because of whatever issues/greed they had.

As I stated earlier there are a lot of business minded professionals that see the earning potential a site that can compete with stars can bring to the table and even before the who SNE debacle work was being put in to build a comparable platform that is cheaper and offers more to the players.

I am hoping that the platform gets the green light as a lot of group have been on this forum for many years and have read all the complaints and accolades of various poker sites and want to make poker a game for players not a money making machine for business.

Don't get me wrong, the team does want to make money but they also value the player and see what happens when you treat them well and when you treat them poorly.

LOL, GL with that, but if you think Amaya is destroying anything, you clearly don't really understand what they are doing, why they are doing it and where the money is. But yeah, have fun with that.

Nice argument champ. This is obviously completely objective and depends where you see value.

If like yourself you see the value in Amaya's pockets then you are obviously never going to agree with the other side. But I'm sure you understand that and just wanted to call someone an idiot for the sake of calling them an idiot

I haven't called anyone an idiot. I just think that any project designed to compete with Amaya will be a failure, for multiple reasons. P* drops more money on user aquisition every month, than they will be able to raise for the whole project. Who are you gonna cater to? 2+2? That's not where the cash comes from. Casual players? You don't have the money to aquire them. Not even to mention "we don't have to make that much" - are you telling that investors as well? Poker (well, Amaya, but that means poker as a whole) is going towards esports/gaming genre and market, not going back to 2005.

Our investors are quite aware of the the current state of the marketplace and the value it has. Currently pokerstars has 70 percent of this market with about 2.2M unique visitors to their site each month.

Investors look for exit strategies and not continual returns and that is what this group is providing based on projections. Once again the model is built with the player in mind as well as the investor.

There is no doubt there is a market shift but once again when you start asking yourself why there is a market shift you will see a lot of holes in your analysis as well.

For one - the reason why there is a shift in market is because Amaya can't afford to reduce their rake to allow players to play longer on their site as that will decrease their revenue.

Two - Amaya has created a rewards program that all it is doing is rewarding players with their own money back. Seems counter intuitive doesn't it. Here go ahead and buy this widget for 10 bucks and we will give you a 5 dollar rebate in the mail. So why not just sell it for 5 bucks and leave the other 5 dollars in the person's pocket.

As an example if you dissect the current stars rewards program you will see how much money they are making at the lower levels where those players don't have the funds to continually re-deposit.

Recreational players have been addressed as well.

Once again we will let Amaya destroy themselves and we will be there as a "poker" alternative for the group in the world that wants to play poker and play it where they are treated with respect and for a price that is fair.

If in fact you had plans to launch a brand new poker site to compete with stars, why would you be yapping about on a public forum on the internet?

seems like a dumb strategy, and you don't sound like a dumb person.

We had stumbled across this thread and just wanted to point out that people are working on options and that there are people out there that believe poker is for the player not for a business to exploit in a negative way.

Considering this discussion hasn't opened up any of our strategy or what is being reviewed, there is no issue. I have been quite careful in what I reveal and saying a new platform is potentially on it's way does not scare stars or any competitor in the least as pointed out.

It's how it will be executed and what will be delivered to the masses is more relevant and confidential.

This also helps with our market research from a different angle. We have reviewed and analyzed the comments and feedback. Being able to communicate with players we don't know directly without having to make you sign a NDA made sense too.

We appreciate the feedback and just want to say a lot of the concerns that have been brought up have been echoed by recreational and regular players alike.

That was the reason for the post.

I hope this is legit as it's about time someone stuck it to Amaya and went back to the core value of looking after their customers (of all types).

There is definitely plenty of money there for the taking if the right company were to come along.

If this is in fact true I wish you luck and look forward to supporting your venture.

Baard Dahl last posted in the Official Pokerstars MTTSNG Suggestion Thread on 23 June 2015.

Andrew West, Head of Poker, last posted in the Official Unibet thread 7 hours ago.

The accountants are acting like the value in the Pokerstars brand is in the nifty graphic design work, rather than in the reputation the company used to have. The people who are brand fish and keep saying they need a red-spade branded site to play on and PokerStars has that monopoly - they seem to agree. Just move.