Why do you think people talk about poker dying, when no one ever talks about blackjack or craps dying? In live poker, craps, and blackjack fish can go to the casino and "make a profit" 20-30% of sessions, so they keep coming back for moar. Online poker is dying because fish want a reasonable chance at winning on a per session basis, however their lossrates are way too large for that to happen at the moment. The only way for online poker, and a fortiori Phil's site, not to die is for fishes' lossrates to fall. The site isn't going to pay for itself, so RIO poker can only lower rake so far in order to lower lossrates. They can do that most easily by lowering winrates of good players (ie, banning or limiting huds and scripts) or lowering the number of regs (ie, capping tables).

the global market is declining, and the big sites see a decline (which of both is the action/reaction, could be discussed of course, but i personally think the boom is over - at least this it was google trends indicates). saying Unibets gain is a proof that growth is possible, leaves out the fact, that PS basically has the same market share, which shows, how small the growth numbers are.

it also leaves out the fact, that unibets main income is the sportsbook, and this market has grown over the years. PS main income is poker and they try to get a foot on the highly competitive casino and sportsbook market, which shows how different those companies are. also please let not forgot, that amaya has to get back into black, which is a short term goal. so reducing the max amount of tables (which would eliminate many micro and low stakes 'pros'), would strength the foundation of the pyramid, but hurt the short term goals (still i guess PS will reduce the tables at some point, we'll see).

so while you're 100% correct that growth is possible and i share your optimism, that RIO poker could be something nice, i would disagree what you said about 'saturated'. the market is in my opinion saturated with regs, b/c rooms face higher costs and struggle with the declining market. so even RIO poker would grow huge, i'm absolutely sure, that there won't be so many professionals like PS had early 2014.

tl;dr: small rooms can grow healthy, bigger competitors have grown too big and try to get into 'shape', and this means cutbacks.

this all may be true, but lowering reg winrates goes against the original post galfond made in rio forum. Some things such as 24 tabling for rb and using seating scripts can (and should) go away, but to "keep the dream alive" multitabling has to be allowed and huds are pretty much necessary for multitabling unless rake is low enough so that ppl can find an edge w the current semigto strategies.

Which country?

Really it depends. As I say, sites do everything they can to get licensed these days, where they can. They will stay in, say, Russia, because the market is huge - but also because there's no avenue for them obtaining local licensing yet.

I don't know of any top tier sites that operate in the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium or Denmark without a license - either they exited or they got licensed. Maybe there's some unlicensed in Estonia and Romania ... but still i think my overall point above stands: Regulation is one of the biggest hurdles and costs to launching a new online gaming site these days.

Bitcoin doesn't avoid any legal nightmares. For e.g., In the UK, the law is quite explicit in stating that Bitcoin is the equivalent of real money. If you offer online gambling in Bitcoin, you need a license, or you are breaking the law. It is the same in all major jurisdictions, to my knowledge, whether explicit or implied.

In fact i cant think of any body anywhere that doesn't think bitcoin is basically legal tender equivalent but i'm happy to be corrected.

That's not how it works. Nor is Bitcoin the ultimate solution for the future of online poker.

I'll throw in the few suggestions I got in mind now :

- MTT schedule with LOT of freezeouts. I play almost only cash game and one of the reasons I don't like MTTs is I have the feeling it will NEVER end and there are 2 main annoying factors : re-buys and late reg.
MTT should be a tough competition when every chip counts from the beginning to the end, not a bingo shovefest where the richest and luckiest donk builds the biggest stack in less than 2 hours of late reg./rebuy period.
I totally understand that from a business POV, re-buys and late reg. tourneys are a massive source of profits and you obviously need to offer some because lot of players enjoy them, that's for sure. But I can't believe I'm the only one to hate these tourneys and who would really enjoy a more "old-school" schedule.
Guarantees don't even need to be really big IMO, it just needs to be very regular.

- Anonymous tables available for every game you offer. And just like MPN, possibility to change screenname after X days or Y hands (on MPN, it's 30 days or 1000 hands).

- No buy-in under 40-50bb in NL/PL cash games. Still possible to offer some "shallow stack" tables but they need to be dedicated to it.

- Bankroll management "tools" : it might sound useless to some people, but I'd like the possibility to split my bankroll in separate "wallets" (CG, MTT, SNG...) and I could freely transfer from any wallet to another one.
It could have some restriction features also, for example : I could set an amount of days during I can't reload/transfer to a specific wallet so if I reach 0$ in MTT wallet for example, I wouldn't be able to play tourneys before I reload it.
Well, obviously, it's not very good for business, once again, but since it's open to ideas...

- YOU, PHIL, PLAYING AT ANY STAKES (MICROS ALOS, OBV), JUST TO SHOW YOU LOVE THE GAME AND WANT TO SHARE YOUR PASSION WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS !!
That would be a REAL marketing bonus. No need to pay 50M to get an idiot footballer having no clue about the game to show his face on ads/software but NEVER play on it, we got Phil Galfond playing a PLO10 game right here, this is priceless !!

I doubt this site will get even nearly enough rec traffic, unless Phil got some massive investors on board.

Made my day. Best of luck Phil!

sorry for the dumb question but what countries will the site be available to?

Good luck Phil Galfond!

Desperately need a table cap. Stars has supernova Russians seat scripting ****ing 5nl playing god knows how many tables!

Anonymous tables are stupid and will just make rec players leaver quicker than they already would.

Looooooooooooooooooool

Can't wait to see what you all come up with, sir. Very exciting news. Best of luck, and THANK YOU!!!

Would love to hear your reasoning for this....

Regarding regulation... is it possible to run the games as virtual play money at one platform thus accepting players from all countries and making the conversion to real money for deposits/withdrawals on another platform? For example you buy X chips for the game(and your new-site-account gets loaded) somewhere from RIO store or whatever (which has nothing commo with the new poker site *wink*) and when you cashout, RIO buys it from you. This way it just becomes a video game like WoW, fifa and whatever kids are playing now.

Regarding the platform obv the most logic thing is creating a new one from scratch (although I have strong feelings for the old Entraction). FTP was probably the biggest regfest, because its old reputation was keeping large number of recs away. Wouldn't be any different with a changed name and color

You are a credit to humanity Mr Gandalf.

Wishing you all the best.

NVG reaches new levels.

Buy World Of Poker Coins to use ingame, and level your character to 99 to reduce participated Rake to the minimum! Get the 100% increased speed mount for only 100 WoP-coins in order to get prioritized to a seat that is otherwise randomized on the must-move table!

LEGENDARIES are for the moment limited in the store to a signed copy of Galfond T-shirts.

edit: Also. How important are mtts really? this old post nails it pretty hard.

TimStone expecting the sausage. Is excited!

I suspect that not everyone shares your definition of "legal nightmare," including governments.

I'm actually really excited to see how this turns out. It's about time someone smart with a proper background creates a well managed poker site. I'm guessing the following changes.
1. Different rake structure in cash games. Only rake a specific percentage on winnings when cashing out.
2. Less stakes to play. There will still be high stakes poker but the jumps between stakes will be higher.
3. 2-4 table cap, which will restrict mindless mass-tabling and bumhunting.
I think 1. would be the most important change currently because it enables 50% of poker players becoming winners instead of the current 5%-20% (?). When there's more winners there's going to be more battling and moving up, which is why most people started playing in the first place.

I've always agreed with his statement and I play on Bovada regularly.

Anon tables do nothing to prevent fish from losing money (win rates of regs don't change on Bovada versus other sites) and only increase their paranoia of bots, etc...

On another note, table caps increase chat abuse immensely. I've never seen more insults being thrown around than what I saw in my first 6 months on Bovada. Players have time to insult one another when they're restricted to 4 tables. Which, also slows down play because they spend more time typing and less time clicking.

People who promote table caps and anon tables as some kind of a savior never take into consideration the negatives.

Every rec player in the world will be against this