Fair enough. But in this thread, it seems like there's plenty of over-optimistic/delusional people with less than half a brain, who thought the site would be out by now. So my post was aimed at those guys.

Include Phil Galfond to the 'optimistic/delusional people with less than half a brain' as he was the one who stated Q1 2017

Nobody is investing in your company if you tell them that there might be a product in 2 or 3 years. If you tell investors that, what they hear is ‘maybe in 5 years, probably never’.

Same reason why governments lie about how long infrastructure projects will take or how much they are going to cost. You always hear some 100% unrealistic best-case scenarios and schedules. 1 year for some highway maintenance in Chicago? Might sound alright until you take a closer look at the numbers and find out that the expected number of bad weather days during a full winter is listed at 5 because that’s what happened that one year back in the 60s.

New Poker sites are a tough thing to start now. If the US rejoins the online market that could make some money pour in, without that not much will happen.

Launching cash games in Summer 2018

Latest Update: https://www.runitonce.eu/news/1-an-update-and-a-plan/

I certainly would've taken the over. I'm actually pretty interested in hearing about the upcoming announcements even though US players won't be able to play there.

"A poker site needs to believe in the dream of poker as a career. It shouldn't cater to professionals over other players, but it must make every policy change with the viability of the dream in mind. "

i.e. favor professional players over all other players' interest in any conflict over every policy choice.

Cathy Newman ITT

Online poker is like an online dating app. You need to find ways to incentivize hot women to join and then men will follow. For poker, you need to find ways to incentivize recreational players and then the pros will follow.

It's very hard to balance these conflicting interests - it's very much a zero sum, actually negative sum, game.

There's a reason Pokerstars has had so many issues. Without the recreational players there is no site. I think there is some balance that could be found but it will be incredibly challenging.

I think Pokerstars' approach, embracing the gambling side of poker and distancing themselves from the skill side, is the better long-term model given the current climate.

Stars coulda saved themselves a ton of misery and hate and just capped table limits to 6. Instead they chose to serve up their homemade brand of rapesauce.

The worst thing that ever happened to poker is allowing a nit reg to play on 24 tables. There is no way a recreational player would ever have fun in that environment.

Recreational players don't want to be quickly crushed and feel like they have no chance of winning.

Recreational players also don't want to play in games full of nitty regs, who take ages to make basic decisions, and winning any money off them is like drawing blood from a stone.

In either of those 2 cases, recreational players will not return. At least, they won't return very regularly. Maybe once every 6 months for a couple of hours if they're bored.

Generally speaking, the average person wants quick action and they want to feel like they have a decent chance of winning. You don't get either of those things in online poker anymore. Certainly not NLHE cash games.

I should have added to my analogy: poker needs to do what dating apps did for women. They made it a more comfortable experience and tailored the apps to women's interests. (Being able to control who can contact you)

Poker has done the opposite by allowing seating scripts and allowing people to sit at 10+ tables. It's the equivalent of a woman opening Tinder and getting immediately bombarded by 20+ messages from horny guys she isn't interested in.

I think if they limited each player to 2 tables and made accounts anonymous it would be in everyone's long-term best interests. Sure, there could be collusion issues but desperate times call for desperate measures. Probably would have to be a site that caters to low and mid stakes.

4max ante zoom cash games could be nice

It seems kind of odd that PokerNews hasn't released an article about a new poker site launching this summer. I guess it isn't that strange if we consider how dominating Stars is over every aspect of poker.

I'm pretty sure pokernews is owned by Amaya so they won't be drawing attention to a competing room.

Its in private beta?

invite me pls

Holy **** a bump that wasn't just someone explaining something about the online poker ecosystem to Phil.

Well Gandalf so obviously does need to hear how the online poker ecosystem from random people in nvg, greg.

Stars seem like awful decision makers.

I'm all for pros, but things like scripts benefit no one except the worst subhuman animals that cannot play the game at high levels and just want to bumhunt.

That's something that should've been banned ages ago.

Just from the fact alone that he is creating a poker site in 2018 shows he has no clue about the poker ecosystem.

Bumhunting is how you make money in poker. You ain't going to make money playing against other regs (and if you do, it will be minimal amounts, high variance and very stressful).

That said, scripts should have been banned years ago.

Your post implies that you believe to know more about the poker ecosystem than Galfond....a pretty much bold claim, isn't it?!

Knowing isn’t understanding. This is why PokerStars is demonised around here even though almost everything they do makes perfect business sense to the few people around here with any business acumen.

Phil might know poker, but he doesn’t know business, so he is going to set money on fire. Hopefully for him he has some kind of stop loss in mind

hyping up