People aren't "clearly willing" to pay Galfond rake at the moment and may never be, so he's making a different choice to an established site.

But I agree. Running ads for beef jerky is a drop in the ocean. Cross-selling them casino and sportsbetting is the way to make rake-free poker work.

You don't get it, do you? People are clearly willing to pay rake, because games are running on Pokerstars and other sites. Why should these sites lower the rake or replace rake with ads, when people are more than happy to play in games with 10+bb/100 in rake?

If it's that easy then why don't you start a site yourself? People are clearly willing to pay rake so you'll make millions....

I agree that an established site like Pokerstars has no reason to change. Galfond can offer this to grab market share then cross-sell gambling, whereas realistically his revenues are going to be close to zero if he gives people no reason to play there or to keep games running.

to answer your question, no, its not. also, poker's volatility makes anything btc gives off look like a joke. finally, im sure you can always set an account in whatever denomination you want if the site is set up correctly if you are that adverse. btc will drastically lower costs over fiat payments like skrill, many of the savings which can then be passed onto you without further worry.

WSEX tried that model. Poker as a loss-leader, to market sports and casino, simply does not work and is not sustainable.

FWIW, the bizarre thing is that you completely missed the difference between buying and building. Amaya's statement was pretty much backwards to your goal of building a larger poker base to serve. Rather it foresees harvesting a poker base; "To serve players" was a cook book..

Another idea for sponsoring is to talk with giants like adidas or puma. I personally hate casino adds. This would drive me away.

A lot of brands are opening up to associating themselves' with poker but most still have this dumb moralistic views on gambling. A lot established brands were open to associate themselves with DFS but it bit them on the ass.

Well a) That's just people who make part of their income from poker, not everyone.

b) They don't know that, they just hear 18-35 Demos with disposable income.

but you're again not addressing the WHY.why pass up all that rake when they could charge rake and still get people to their sportsbook/casino? what business does that?especially in the casino industry. and that's an even worse idea bc you're letting pro poker players take their money away rake free in the hopes they dump it in the casino-but now they have less money to dump.

these sites don't exist for pros to make money.

true, mainland chinese flooding macau and betting thousand of HKD on baccarat. I apologise, my bad, i was having mainly macau people in mind when i made my comment.
Thing is, their game of choice is baccarat, not poker unfortunately. How to get these mainland chinese into online poker though?

But they do eat don't they? Talk with Nutella.
If one can promote himself well than there are chances to find a sponsor at least for a limited probably one year contract with option to continue when both side are happy with the development.

All what rake? You're not addressing the fact that Galfond isn't raking anything because he doesn't have any customers. He isn't part of the casino industry. He doesn't have a brand.

Betfair poker NJ:

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2014/...n-nj-19979.htm

Closed after raking $1 in September 2014 and $0 in October 2014, following on from $90 total rake in 2013.

That's what it looks like if you don't have a USP or established brand.

Hi Russ

good point and what @suited39 alluded to when talking about lack of live cash game growth in Macau. Though PokerStars Macau continues to grow their live MTT business, and there exists a growing network of psuedo-underground poker clubs throughout mainland china, poker does seem to have some cultural acceptance issues with Chinese (something I have spent some time thinking about but have no explanation)

and back to @timmystoners point about China > India...

its actually India > China re: online poker opportunity, imo.

Its actually the opposite, at least for cash games.

As the player pool globalized, and the quality of opposition at any given stake is set by the value of alternatives for smart people, low stakes games are populated with opponents sufficiently tough and boring, from less wealthy countries, to prevent retention of recs in the countries where the money comes from.

That's why a square kilometer in the centre of London has more mid stakes cash games running than Pokerstars globally. 1 seat per person, and you can't get to that seat while enjoying an Eastern Europe cost of living, its not worth it for competent Londoner's to make £5-£15 ph, the games stay OK, and people come back.

Games need segregating by some proxy for wealth and action, just like high stakes home game hosts have known for decades.

hmm .... never thought about it on those terms. makes good sense and does solve the aforementioned "belarus" problem.

Regulatory aside for a moment, MTTs globalized for large prize pool, and cash games localized maybe?

I've suggested before having the quick seat feature put people with the same first language together so that a) they can actually chat in their own languages and b) there is less trouble with tragedy of the commons type issues because the regs from a particular country have some actual chance of being sat again with the same players.

Though tbh I like the unibet model of semi-anonymous and no chat.

sure what poker needs the most atm is even more segregation. winning regs are gonna find ways to play no matter what and ur only blocking out recs/bad regs.

@lektor - ??? its a pretty horrible idea imo. Basically ur giving a few western (and brazilian) regs softer tables. Seems pretty unfair.

No, because I don't have the marketing budget of a site like Pokerstars. This is where Galfond's site will fail.

@ciderr Maybe - what if the software had an option of "sit me with this person in future" - obviously the losing players would be "wanted" by lots of regs, but the regs who would get them would be those "wanted" by the losing player, i.e. those who are willing to chat and show the person a good time - more like a poker social network. So anyone could learn Portuguese and play with the Brazilians and it would be fair. In any case there should be an option for tables chatting in different languages even if they are not compulsory.

@MultiTabling - then your post 752 makes no sense. We're talking about Galfond not pokerstars.

He will not fail easy if at all. He has for sure already some big investors in the pocket.

So long as the system required a mutual preference, this would be interesting. Some tables could be set aside as "social", in the sense that only matched players could sit.

OTOH, it could be easily gamed and abused .... across a variety of ways.

Think aobut what happens when a site offers private cash games for example.

Completely get rid of lobby and just have auto-sit functions.