Yes, poker is a fantastic game and it's massive anywhere it isn't suppressed. Compared with 2006 online is obviously smaller in some markets (e.g. the US and places more culturally dependent on it - though US podcasts seem to be reporting live venues opening in more markets) and bigger in others. Pokerstars were advertising on primetime TV here in Slovakia last night in the middle of whatever trash my wife was watching. In the US, the WSOP main event gets about the same number of entrants as it got 10 years ago.

When people on here complain about the state of the games they are really talking about there being a much higher share of stronger players making it harder to make a career of it than there not being enough games to sit in - though of course that depends on gametype/stakes too.

It's not really a VC product anyway because we're talking about an already saturated market that requires an absurd amount of marketing money to quickly get a foot into the door.

Maybe a new competitor can eventually get a decent market share and there's going to be some growth in the overall market through regulation in old markets and organic growth in new markets. But that's still not what VCs really want, even 30% share of a market that grows 30% over the next couple of years doesn't sound that appealing.

I am pretty sure online poker is on the decline in almost all markets that had their boom in the mid to late 2000s. Both in regulated and semi-legal markets. There are lots of markets that still have huge growth potential but investors are probably not happy about putting serious money into a product that already peaked in the western world.

Yes, but the side-point our American friend was making is that it has declined to the level of the mid 2000s, not to e.g. 2001 levels.

Still no aditional info from Phil about the site?

Isn't the player pool down a lot since 2006 and now it is just fewer people (i.e. regs) generating much more rake on average?

Phil has hopefully (for him) gotten around to examining the economics of starting a poker site that caters to the very group of players that has systematically destroyed the game over the past ~8 years. Doubt it gets off the ground and if it does he will surely soon tire of burning his money


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deelted

This Domino's Pizza rule thing is a really, really good idea!

Okay I just got back to poker a bit this year and I'm just catching up on all the news, and I'm kind of surprised nobody has mentioned this about Galfond, maybe it's bad for the game to say but I don't care: Now that he's lost a bunch of weight, his lips look way too sensual.

Everyday I check this thread hoping for news... and nothing. Hoping Rio poker room will be running by this saturday... but it's looking so unlikely. Just waiting for the delay announcement at this point. Please Rio poker, save us from the evil empire poker sites!

rome wasn't build in one day and PG wasn't happy about his early announcement. besides that, Sciolist and SwoopAE posted really interesting stuff on the previous page, so to use the 'waiting time' a bit more efficiently, you could read that.

idk why so many ppl bump this thread anyway ... it's like we're all sitting in this family van and we're on the way to walley world and the kids are asking "are we there yet?" over and over again ... the site goes online, when it goes onlie for heaven's sake

Phil said he'd post an update soon on RIO.

Level much ...?! Because of an announcement made seven months ago, you seriously expect that the "Q1 17" target is gonna hold? Don't hold your breath, it's unhealthy mate

He just did! At bottom of the original thread

http://www.runitonce.com/chatter/a-poker-site-should/

"I feel great about where we are headed; It's just that we're headed further than we initially expected."

Music to our ears!!

I much prefer things done right to things done quickly; however, given stars' intention to bend over players some more soon, I really hope gandalf & team can make this happen asap

Yeah, it would be very bad if they would rush everything and then would have to change a lot of things aftert the launch or even worse - ignore those issues.

Do you guys think it will launch by the end of the summmer? I hope so.

It would be amazing if RIO starts pulling people away from Stars in big numbers. Screw them they deserve to lose everything!

Dan Pena says it's better business to launch a marginal product immediately than to release a near perfect one later. If left up to the engineers the product would never get released as they obsessively want it to be perfect.


Here's Dan explaining why you're poor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxMYvPy8QwA

I wish this new venture every success but I fear for its viability for two main reasons.

Its obvious means of attracting a lot of players quickly is by charging less cash game rake and giving better rewards. But I feel that this may have the main effect of making the market (in terms of what competitors charge) more efficient, so it will lower rake elsewhere but not necessarily attract the cash game player numbers that RIO poker want and need.

And then if they don't have enough cash game players on their network then the games are not as good or don't run as often, which again protects the existing big poker sites from an exodus of cash game players.

The second main reason is that although still lucrative, the on line poker market is shrinking or at best stagnating which one would think is a big reason why poker sites are pushing more and more casino, slot and low skill poker games at their customers, to compensate for their shrinking or stagnating poker based revenues.

Indications thus far are that RIO poker is not going down this route, so this puts them at a revenue disadvantage compared to existing poker operators.

RIO Poker of course does have the natural advantage of it starting from a blank sheet of paper thus making it easier to make the perfect poker playing platform, and its expertise of having Phil Galfond at the helm and other poker players involved, I assume, at a senior and/or advisory/consultancy level.

They can also cross sell to customers and or incentivize new customers with the RIO training site and videos.

I still think it will be a tough ask because a lot of player procurement and retention is down to the spending of pure hard cash, in terms of general marketing spend (on line, print and TV advertising, social media, affiliates, etc), plus new sign up bonuses, initial rake back offers, free rolls, and MTT guarantees that may sometimes fall short, etc etc.

Certainly players who are very active and know how successful and well respected Phil Galfond is may gravitate towards playing on RIO Poker even at the occasional expense of turning down slightly better game selection elsewhere, but survival and prosperity in on line poker as an operator is about getting new players in at the bottom of the pyramid as well as getting existing players to switch platform loyalty for most of their play and not just for a small part of it.

I also feel that a live poker tour adds a lot of prestige to a new on line poker site. Maybe RIO will have this but if they don't then the site will look less attractive IMO to new players especially. Again, a live poker tour has the feel of a loss leading enterprise to me, so could be a problem financial viability wise for a start up poker site.

All of this is against a background of big set up costs before the "doors even open" on day one, and ongoing business costs, staff, accommodation and a multitude of other expenses.

The monthly cash burn on this venture must be very large.

Clearly if a significant amount of revenue already spent and monthly ongoing cash burn is being financed by investors then the venture has bought itself time to succeed, but this doesn't get away from two key factors; that the competition will react with a price war and/or marketing spend war if necessary, and with player incentives to procure new players as well as retain existing ones, and on line poker is shrinking, so will RIO's investors eventually crack and demand non skill games are added to the RIO Poker web site to maximise the revenue from its costly to procure customer base, a measure which it seems is against Phil Galfond's own ethos and vision for the company.

We shall see......

Good luck to the venture. I would love to see it succeed and to be much better for players than the sites that already exist. I am pretty sure Phil Galfond and his team will deliver this, but financial sustainability when battling again multi billion dollar capitalised competition is my concern.

I think that's general knowledge by now. Even Apple usually only gets it right by their second version of a product.

The problem with a poker site, compared to other software products, is the level of integrity/security that needs to be in place as soon as people play for real money.

There's a big amount of alpha/beta play money testing required before you can release a real money poker site to the general public. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a private play money beta months ahead of product launch.

my wet dream is that the Scheinberg family is behind this...

it could be Kim Jong Un behind it, fine with me if the games are good.

I feel like he needs a big Twitch streamer like Doug Polk to get this thing off the ground

So.. Q1 2018? Phil made a new post on rio