They're "working on it", no specific details announced.

Right now, yes - Indian players can sign up on PokerStars.com like most of the world. Once they "launch" in India, I'm assuming that Indian players will be segregated from the rest of the world like other "local" sites (Adda52, Spartan, ********** et al)

I don't understand exactly how Irish regulation works, but it is not sufficient to just have a Maltese licence. A few years ago there was a change and several operators withdrew from the Irish market, for example Winamax and Unibet. Unibet is still not available in Ireland despite owning Stan James, which is licensed and available in Ireland.

My guess is that only the larger sites or those sites which have a large bookmaking operation in Ireland bothered to get an Irish licence, hence the withdrawl of some smaller sites.

lmao jmo bought the runitoncepoker.com url to redirect to his tweet

I never knew the answer for that in those markets, but surprises me that just simple RNG cert and then good to go. so easy. seems too easy.

ha. if we ever get to meet face to face I'll tell the story of me, 4 agents from NGCB, and a guy with drill in my wife's closet where there just happened to be a floor safe which I never used and was locked.

but during the interview they asked if I had one, which I said yes... so 1 hour later, there we all were



that is still confusing to me. There ar no laws that makes what Stars is doing in India illegal, nor any laws that make it legal. I would think an outside regulator like NJ (where stars got licensed) would look at that like them operating in an illegal market.

thoughts?

I have to admit that i'm very pessimistic about this. Launching a site to compete with the big guys would require an enormous investment, far above Galfonds reach unless he has some people willing to invest in a market that has as best stagnated.

Not only that but I'm sure RIO training memberships will be in the vip store or something.

Given there's a lot of "expert" opinion in here I will post mine.

I believe the site will never happen (at least not in 2018 or 2019)

The original claim was to launch the site in half a year from an announcement. IMO poker site is a such a huge project that half a year before launch you should have fully working software product under heavy testing and sorting out last legal and marketing issues.
From later announcements it sounds like the product is incomplete indicating that the estimates were waaay off and probably they still are.
"Inside view fallacy" is very typical for software projects.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-fu...he-inside-view

He's just launched a DFS site. Hopefully not taking too much of his focus away...

really odd ... 'just' for USA and Canada, so no hints about potential RIO poker licences.

news: https://www.legalsportsreport.com/15...fs-draftboard/
PG's blog: http://www.runitonce.com/chatter/the...draftboardcom/

A week or two back, he said he wanted to talk briefly about the status of RIO Poker because they had some big non-poker announcement to make and he didn't want people to speculate that RIO Poker was dead - guess this was it.

i see this as pretty positive news for those hoping for RIO Poker. This product looks at a glance to be highly polished for a Day 1 launch, and they've got some interesting innovation in there. So it shows that (a) they can deliver an RMG game, (b) they have the development chops (c) they can get a product to market

https://twitter.com/PhilGalfond/stat...45993518428160

edit: how the **** do you embed a tweet?

I wonder how that's defined. In software development, unless you're writing in assember or something, you are always building on top of components built by other people.

I hope it would be enough to do a fig leaf more than just "compiled in India" from the objects used for the RoW software.

Under UK regulation they are supposed to be able to submit a reasonable explanation for why they are operating in any market.

https://www.betting-business.co/2017...arket-revenue/

"For each of these markets above the threshold, the B2C company must explain to the commission why they think the services they provide to the region are not illegal – either through proof of licence, or even some other written justification. They must also inform the commission of any other markets they are targeting to help grow their business."

In the case of EU markets it's usually that they consider their licence in e.g. Malta to be valid for the whole EU as per past ECJ cases.

Not sure why you put "expert" in quotation marks. Nobody itt has claimed to be an "expert".

[TWEET [/TWEET
put the numbers after /status/ in between.

What makes you think his site will be successful? I see theres still a bunch of PG blowhards on here.

He's only acted out of self interest/greed his entire career in the poker limelight. First it was cheating that billionaire out of millions. Then it was coaching, then it was his training site. He's not helping anyone but himself and will continue to operate that way.

What makes you believe that his pokersite and fantasy draft garbage is nothing more than another one of his money grabs?

Be good if this can happen

Relax made Unibet's first version of their poker software in nine months. Then, while continuing to update that, they (we, now) made the second in twelve.

I think you'll find that PokerStars allows players from within the EU to play on the Maltese license (except, of course, the locally regulated nations).


It seems to me - from my very in-expert opinion - that it might be possible to offer services throughout the EU on the back of a UK license, rather than a Maltese one. The downside, however, is that you'd likely pay a different, and larger, chunk of taxes.

Wow. That's very impressive. Would you share any info on the size of the team involved in these two versions?

Germany has three clients:

DE - playmoney (yellow spade, so no harm is done)
EU - real money
SH - Schleswig-Holstein (connected to COM/EU but w/ some restrictions like no P2P transfers)

Schleswig-Holstein has a regulated market, while - like hood pointed out - the others states signed a treaty, which is against EU law (and therefore is ignored by major operators)


if i had to guess, i would say RIO needs IoM, Malta and UK to serve the most important markets. don't think BG, DK, SH and other licences would be worth for a small operator. If (!) ES, IT, PT and FR will have a 'big island solution' i guess that might be a different story.

I´m really disappointed by the DFS site. Instead of focusing on building a world-class poker client he goes for the $ by trying to be a jack of all trades.

in before: RIOpoker ICO based on Ethereum

Just because he's released a DFS platform, it doesn't mean they've stopped on Poker...

Indeed, but listening to the excellent interview by Andrew and Nate...
...it doesn't sound like the poker site is very close to release. The development problems have apparently been quite severe and frustrating.
For the other people asking/predicting, Galfond also ruled out bitcoin deposits. Apparently bitcoin is not yet allowed by UK/European gambling regulators, and there are some other strange rules that need to be built into the software, such as reminding players when they've been gambling for an hour. :/

they probably realized poker site is not that profitable

I feel like poker is becoming more and more popular, so I think the site is definitely coming out. However I'm starting to think they are like 2 years away from launch.

Check google trends for online poker... it's been a steady decline now for years. This site probably won't come out, and even if it does it will tank.