For some Run It Once pros, $999 won't even buy you an hour of their coaching. <-- yet 0% of them make even 250$/hourEV at online poker 2018 lol.

If you were to look, start with TSG's Q3 because that includes all their new acquisitions. They will make around $900 million in 2018 from online poker.

It's quite something to reflect that they have grown an online casino to one of the largest in the world, just bought the UK's biggest sportsbook, acquired 2 big Australian sports books, and online poker is still their biggest money maker.

The issue you're going to hit with any kind of analysis like this is that online poker operators make 2/3rds of their money from tournaments. Normally cash game traffic can be used as proxy for comparative size, but RIO Poker will not have tournaments. So they might have 2x or 3x the cash game traffic of a competitor, as still be clearing less money a month.

And that's obviously before we take into account all the other variables that make these comparisons messy.

why would anyone charge their ev.........

Yeah, why would they bother to ever master the art of coaching if they could only charge their hourly EV, considering that the variance isn't a big concern because the lack of relative skill, not the bankroll size, is likely the main obstacle preventing them from moving up?

Who cares if some online pros charge $999 an hour.

The fact is the common man does not have a thousand dollars a year to spend on poker videos.

do they disclose margin by product segment? Also, I would suspect internal forecasted growth rates for non poker eclipse poker? just a guess.

I wonder if RIO has plans for sports book. Would players feel betrayed given RIO player value proposition.

Don't know what Phil's real M is , but seems to be weighted toward IV stuff.

RIO investor (s) are I'm sure only focused on E (unless Phil is only investor then no difference between his and investors M). But, not adding sports book is lighting money on fire, given marketing dollars could be leveraged for both with virtually same spend.

With live sports books expanding in the US, the revenue forecasts coming out are LARGE.


Didnt know that. Weird in that is exact opposite for live rooms cash is probably 4/5ths or more of profit.

A big part of the tournament revenue comes from jackpot SNGs nowadays.

But do the tournaments have much more than 2/3 of the traffic or what?

I say this because if you play some 4 tables of small stakes cash for a few hours, vs loading a few tournaments on a sunday, you will pay much more money per hour playing cash vs mtt's, that's why I don't understand their will to kill most cash games.

Are there more consistent winners and withdrawals playing cash? But if someone wins a big score in a tournament they probably cashout forever a huge part of it; if someone goes on a upswing in cash they move up in stakes and pay probably even more rake in the future.

Will rio not have tournaments?

Only Cash for now. Tournaments will come in the future.

I think this ratio is explained by the necessity of using physical poker tables and dealers actively. When an MTT table closes, it's more profitable to reopen it for a CG than to let it idle, especially because some jurisdictions charge a fixed tax per installed table. An STT also utilises the table less efficiently than a CG.

Besides, there's a sunk cost effect - the players have spent time to drive to the casino, and they often fancy playing more instead of going home after they bust early in the MTT.

This doesn't matter all that much in online poker, though the load on servers increases during large MTTs and can disrupt the other running games. Normally, though, the load is quite balanced because MTTs start frequently - it costs almost nothing to spawn a few online tables temporarily, whereas the supply of live tables is limited and sometimes doesn't allow to start side events frequently.

Besides, Spin & Gos haven't become a hit in live poker, partly because it's hard to visualise a spin that could produce 1000x-10000x multipliers with a fair-looking frequency, partly because the dealer is underutilised in a 3-handed game and requires higher rake per player.

would be interested to hear, which active pro do you think charges 1k/hr and doesnt have 250/hr ev online

I am 100% you are wrong here.
2/3 of the players are tournament players but cashgame rake is more than 50% of a sites income (barring Stars from the equation)

We can make a friendly bet if you want to: $100 to any charity of the winners choice. We ask Alex Scott from Microgaming if he can give the numbers: I win if the majority of income (50%) of majority of skins on Microgaming are cashgame, you win if more than 60% of income are from tournamets (you did set the line yourself at 66% above) and a draw between 50% and 60%.

Ye i'd be amazed if 2/3 of revenue comes from tournaments

Why would we be barring stars from the equation? They are 70% of the market. That doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, charts below show the revenue #s from the entire French (of which Winamax is >50%, before you jump on that) and Spanish online poker markets for Q3 2018. Tournaments make up 66% to within one or two % points. So yeah, when I say operators make 2/3rds of their money from tournaments I wasn't just making stuff up.

I'm not interested in taking your money.

I think you're both right. For some sites (e.g. Stars, Winamax), tournaments (inc. jackpot SNGs) generate the bulk of the revenues. For others (Unibet, and presumably MPN), cash is still king. When Unibet launched their own version of Spins two weeks ago, their head of poker said...

It's a digression at best, a strawman at worst.

The discussion was around PokerStars and how much money they make. I was asked directly what 7dma was needed for RIO to break even. I said that a big problem you have is that the market is largely tournaments, which RIO won't have, so that comparison isn't going to work (and that's before)

For just trying to help I get "called out" and challenged to some bet about how I'm wrong because Unibet or MPN might make more from cash games.

We were literally just talking about PokerStars and their online poker revenue.

I bet RIO will have tournaments within 6 months of launching the site

Initially I would imagine they are looking to get there software working smoothly (cash is the best way of doing this) and once they have it working well, tournaments will follow shortly after.

But you clearly see from the graphic that cash games were a bigger percentage of revenue, so you're just cherrypicking the last few quarters. Which doesn't say if there are much more players playing tournaments vs cash games.

As a player in a semi-close market/high rake environment (ps.frespt), I've also seen the decline in cash games in the last 18 months. Of course with unbeatable rake for 95%+ of the players, people won't keep playing forever if they can't win.

RIO will have a better policy with price. Now someone will say that there will be much more regs playing and not enough fun players. But trust me, under 200NL the difference in percentage rake and huge bb caps is vital - it's worse than having two potential great players on your table (which rarely happens at those stakes anyway).

Will the site ever open to American players?

I believe for New Jersey, the answer is yes.

will it be a closed pool like pokerstars.nj right ? or worldwide ?

I think that you need to have some money for big MTT guarantees which Phil doesn't have yet. It's the right move to add first only cash games to generate some profit and after that you can start adding some MTT's.

I asked that question during beta testing in the Discord channel. RIO guys (I think Phil himself, actually) answered: one combined player pool. I like that

I don't believe that's true at the moment but if you have a source confirming it please do share