I was really excited about this site, I really hope Phil can turn things around

Actually it`s not that simple. Try it. Try hiring a software engineer for a new product. it`s probably someone you dont know. You start by reading his resume.
You think everything in a persons resume is the truth, you`ve never worked a day out there in the real world.
The real problem with complex software tho, is that you can never guarantee that it will work right away. Quite the opposite actually. If it contains more than a handful lines of code, you should immediately show the door to anyone who promises you that he knows exactly how to do it.

(I worked in that field for over a decade)

As someone with no clue can you explain how a poker client is coded/what makes it so difficult? What would be the first steps of creating etc?

Something has gone seriously wrong with the current software presented to the players. Whether the problem is because of glitches, servers, authors, or something else is somewhat irrelevant.

There must be many heated arguments going on in the RIO offices atm, but the primary question that Phil should be asking is, "Why do we have these problems, and how and when will they be fixed?" If his team doesn't know the answers, exactly, and are not able to give precise dates of fixes, then he should be considering pulling the plug on real money games, albeit temporarily, now, before he loses more money, respect and faith. I don't remember reading how many staff are on his books, but I assume his current full site wage bill is considerable, and obviously it cannot be continued to be paid indefinitely, so an upward trend in the numbers of satisfied paying customers has to be essential for RIO to remain in existence. The laying off of "unnecessary" staff until charged rake is incoming again may well be something he doesn't want to effect, but, unfortunately, that is what might be necessary to achieve his and his keen supporters' goal.

The site could continue in test-mode with play money, only, in the meantime, in the vein of his request of, "I’m not asking you to move all of your play to Run It Once, or even to move 5% of it there. All I’m asking is that you don’t wait. Play one hand ... on Run It Once Poker." We can continue, as potential future customers, to give feedback and suggestions on this basis, but without the stress and annoyance of losing money because of the current problems. After which, I believe we all hope, RIO can reopen its doors to effective and good for purpose real money games on a site that we can respect and trust as a big competitor in the present market.

Last but not least, my strong advice would be to make RIO unique by promoting the site as the one for elite players. Forget the recs and attract the regs. The other sites are trying to drive off the regs. Give them somewhere to go where they can play honest and high quality poker against the best players on the internet. (The recs with egos will follow, in any case.)

As counter productive as they may originally sound I actually 100% agree with this. There are A LOT more 'recs with egos' than people want to admit and I think one of the main reasons Full Tilt reached the peak that it did was because it catered to the whole "Play With the Pros" theme. If RIO can have that kind of allure, that the 'best of the best' are playing here even the super fun players will be intrigued.

Almost no fish think they are fish, and the ones that do would rather lose against someone they've heard of so they can have a story. I guess anonymous tables could be a bit of an issue with that, maybe if enough people are streaming this could counteract. Who knows, it's definitely a balancing act.

You're not really a good one to comment, because as CEO of True Poker, you had the opportunity to really turn your site into something huge, but you didn't listen to what the players wanted, and the whole place became an afterthought.

I'm talking about back in 2001, before Pokerstars, and just as Party was getting off the ground.

You had a great site with amazing graphics and gimmicks for the time, but your weird obsession with making it a "true" poker experience (meaning slow play, no multitabling, watching the dealer actually shuffle/burn, etc) eventually drove most people off, while Party exploded.

And I say all of this as a huge fan of 2001 era True Poker.

This is a pretty good post, except I don't think there are heated arguments in the RIO offices.

The most maddening thing here -- and you can see it from Phil's various updates -- is that they seem to truly believe that they're mostly on the right path.

The "mistakes" they admit only involve to the now-fired first development team.

As far as the current team and managerial decisions, Phil seems a-okay with everything.

In the meantime, there's a deafening cacophony of voices stating that the entire project was bungled in very major ways, and they need to change course immediately in order to have a snowball's chance in hell.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem they're taking any of the advice seriously, and thus the site is failing.

They seem to be lacking knowledge of the market/customers, and are also sorely lacking the humility to accept/process constructive criticism.

Of course, this is a site whose Operations Manager permabanned one of their few active players for using the word "imbecile" once.

This whole debacle seems like an episode of "Silicon Valley".

Couldn't agree with this more.


This is just so ridiculous on so many levels.

Like, you don't think they feel any pressure in the back office while their capital is on the line?

What other kind of attitude do you suggest a company takes publicly? Start speaking negatively about themselves?

Development team mistake is the most important mistake and everything else follows out of it. If the client was launched with all intended features, functionality and game varieties reception would have been much different.

On what do you base your assumption that they don't take any advice seriously? Because they haven't implemented any changes over night? In your view, how would their willingness to accept/process constructive criticism manifest itself? Changing everything based on the latest clueless post on the forum before they even get a chance to fully implement their ideas?

RIO is a work in progress. The fact that it still is after so much time already went into it definitely merits all kinds of criticism. Changing the development team was the right step towards fixing that situation. Now, until it is finished, hold your useless criticism and instead suggest something useful that could be built into it to make it better.

In my outside opinion, the RIO-team seems completely overwhelmed and naive.
I don't doubt that they try to do the right changes but they might need some outside consultant to help them with marketing, public relation and software development.


But hating on them doesn't help. Either play on the site and accept the bugs or leave and come back when the site is ok for you.

I am starting to wonder if the RIO team is just Phil Galfond making all the decisions on his own, it certainly looks that way.

My post would be ridiculous if we didn't have any insight and updates provided by the CEO. Then we'd just be guessing, and it wouldn't be fair to interpret silence to mean inaction.

However, we do have insight and updates from Galfond.

He has clearly stated that, while he's not happy with some of the site's failures, he feels that they generally are on the right path since firing the first development team.

Yet everyone is screaming that they are NOT on the right path, and that the present team (including Phil himself) has made loads of major mistakes.

If Phil were really interested in changing course, he would say so right now, and then inform everyone that a lot of their suggestions are in the process of being implemented.

Instead, it seems we keep getting updates like, "Thanks everyone for your positive and negative comments, we hear them all. But here's why we aren't changing anything..."

Since when a group of mostly anonymous forum posters constitutes "everyone"? It would be irresponsible for a CEO to change plans of a company as soon as such "everyone" post their opinion. Your extreme and dramatic language just shows a nativity about how things actually work. And your anger is misplaced.

In none of his updates did Phil exclude the possibility of eventually altering RIO based on player feedback. On a contrary, he always said that RIO will be taking data into account constantly. And he did acknowledge that they are listening to the feedback.

They simply have bigger issues at hand at the moment. Their development is way behind and of subpar quality so far. Replacing the development team to address that was way more important than starting altering their games right now. New team has a lot of catching up to do. Fixing the bugs and expanding the functionality of the client is by far the most important step right now. Adding other game varieties (SNGs, tournaments, mixed games) being the second most important step. Once that is in place they can start expanding their marketing.

And only then, after assessing the data once all of the above has been implemented should they start considering altering their games. Hopefully the new development team is competent enough to get them to that point in a reasonable amount of time.

You're unhappy that Phil hasn't stated that he will be for sure implementing the proposed changes(of which there isn't even a consensus among a handful of people posting ITT). The way I see it is I'm happy he's not trying to please the crowd but is being transparent about what they are doing. I personally value that. And I agree with him giving the priority to what's most important first.

There will be time when implementing changes will be a right thing to do but they're still too far away from that point. And for them to publicly state now were they stand as a company in relation to all the proposed changes would be premature and irresponsible. All they can say is that they are listening to the feedback and taking it into account which is exactly what they've done. And RIO is still the most likely poker company out there to actually follow up on player suggestions.

As end-users, we all show naivety continually when complaining about all of the sites' apparent tardiness in fixing their "simple" bugs. When a site has been up and running for a long time, there have usually been large numbers of attempted tweaks and fixes to the programs by numerous different programmers. Almost every single tweak that is effected is not at all the simple job we think it should be. The new bits of code, whilst probably effective as stand-alone pieces of work, once tacked on to the base programs, can then create all sorts of unwanted effects, or glitches, by affecting code that was written perhaps years ago by some long gone programmer whose mistakes or shortsightedness in catering for future changes have been corrected over time by yet other tweaks by yet other programmers. We see this all the time, and yet rarely do we acknowledge actually how extremely difficult it is to make what are thought of and desired as quick fixes of minor problems; particularly on the older sites.

Ironically, (assuming most of the RIO program was written almost from the ground up), firing the first development team could now have added extraordinarily lengthy delays and difficult new problems to resolve, and perhaps it was not wisest the thing to do at this relatively early stage of the game. Presumably the team was of a more than decent level of competence in order to produce the RIO as it was released, and therefore it seems reasonable to me that if given some more time without the added pressure of going live before the known glitches were investigated and fixed by those who it seems should have known the programs inside out, we would probably be very close to perfection, in terms of Phil's vision of what he actually wanted to release, within just a few months at most.

I am still of the opinion that pulling the plug on (at least) real money games, temporarily, is almost vital to RIO's future success. Apart from the obvious funding concerns, why put yourself in the position to have current players badmouth you and give RIO bad publicity that will remain online forever? Would it not be far better to come back to market in a number of months' time with a new, competitive, fully functioning and unique poker site, hopefully to a sudden plethora of enthusiastic and positive reviews for taking the necessary time to present such to the poker playing public?

Doesn't make sense to me. There is playerpool of about 40 - 50 people atm. They seem to enjoy the game, so why would you pull the plug?
Personally I think the games are not juicy enough to cope with the bugs so I decided not to play there. I will give it another try when the bugs are fixed.
But still, I cannot imagine that the site will become popular amongst recs. I don't see a bright future for RIO whether u pull the plug for now or not.

What really blows my mind is the fact that so many players (regs?) are hating on STP.

Without any insider knowledge it's impossible to accurately asses how good the decision to replace first development team actually was.

But there was definitely smoke and IMO it's less probable that Phil would have made that decision if there was no fire.

And if that was something that was holding RIO back we all ought to step back and give them time to work out all the kinks, which as you stated are not easy to fix.

As far as them pulling the plug on real money play for now (btw, they don't have play money games, real money is all they offer) I doubt that that would help on the publicity front. It would generate a lot of negative headlines way beyond this forum. Not to mention all the logistical headaches in regards to staff, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if that would also bear some costly licensing implications, but I'm purely speculating of course.

Only they know how much longer they can afford to operate without a profit. But if they can afford it IMO they should leave the doors open.

There are people now complaining that they aren't getting fairly compensated for the equity they don't get to realize because of crashes and bugs. As I understand, RIO is having problems delivering hand histories. How do you properly report when you have no hand history and no hud software? And if RIO can't reasonably split the equity..how can we think they will be able to afford to appease the customers that each feel robbed from the buggy software? RIO needs to pull the (public) plug asap.

Hand histories should be an early debugging tool so I think its unimaginable how these problems can't be dealt with in a timely fashion.

Yes and no. I loosely refer to this as scalability. It is supposed to be the PRIMARY job of the programming team to make the software such that you minimize the problems you describe and its starting to seem plainly obvious there was no such consideration. And it makes me think that the new team is not smart enough or moral enough to tell phil that the code from the first team needs to be completely abandoned. You wouldn't try to fix code that wasn't designed for scaling.

What I am reading out of all this is that Phil surrounded himself with yes people and so you have a similar thought here as me.

There is a ton of evidence that shows that the first team was terrible.

I want to write some paragraphs and I'll do it a next single post.

When Phil first announced he was setting out to launch a poker site I wrote an article stating that RIO wouldn't be able to bootstrap essentially based on Phil's prediction of launch time. Its not possible to create a battle ready poker software without a great amount and many levels of testing. I've written 100's of articles on how the old model for poker sites can no longer be used to bootstrap in this environment considering what we might call the “geo-politics” (ie governments and legacy sites do NOT want poker competitors to arise to serve the global population).

I've been argued heavily by many players here when I try to say the barriers/cost to entry into the traditional sphere make it effectively impossible to do.

And then I wrote many articles explaining how to utilize new software technology to implement a business model that removes these costs and barriers.

RIO poker, under Phils direction (obviously unknowingly) went against nearly every recommendation I made (aside from the streamer rakeback program perhaps).

He started out saying “A poker site needs to believe in the dream of poker as a career.” and the first policy decisions he made were cuts against what most careers players would consider poker. He fragmented his field before he even launched and created a software that can't scale and only offers a very nuanced online poker experience.

Phil extended the myth and lie that Daniel Negreanu was paid to sell to the players as poker stars began to reneg on its rakeback program-the idea that the losers must be protect from the winners and the idea that such an increase in effective rake would make the games better. Phil tried to solve a whole bunch of problems that RIO poker didn't have.

And this whole time I have been nearly alone in saying this:

It is quite obvious that the success of poker in the past was built on the idea that you can play with your hero's simply by paying (its why there are sponsored pros!). RIO made policies such that its impossible to do so (anon tables!). The entire project has gone in an impossible to work direction and needs to be re-started from scratch.

And I do have (A LOT of) very specific advice especially in regard to the code and the development team but I guess we all need to see the traditional method fail and how much money was lost trying before the people interested (players, phil, rio this community etc) are willing to admit that the barrier to enter with the traditional model makes bootstrapping impossible.

You're totally missing the point.

RIO's problems come from few different and distinct sources.

Problem #1 has to do with bugs. That is something which can only be handled by the current development team, and all Phil can do is attempt to manage their time and staffing so these bugs get fixed as quickly as possible.

However, problem #2 comes from a poor understanding of what is important to online poker player. That cannot be blamed on a development team. It should be well known to anyone watching that resizable tables, MTTs, and hand histories are essential to the online poker experience. Those come first, and everything else comes second. Launching without that stuff, especially in the late 2010s, is suicide. It's like designing a new car and putting it out to market when it lacks air conditioning and seat belts.

There should have been zero resources put into things like "splash the pot" until MTTs, resizables tables, and hand histories were complete. Same with those silly avatars which change based upon play style. Even if you want to say that those were a plus, no resources should have been spent on those until the basics were complete.

Problem #3 comes from a poor understanding of marketing online poker. The streamer compensation was innovative, but that's like having some nice icing but no cake to put it on. They did not set aside a proper marketing budget to bring recs to the site, and instead counted on Phil's known name and that streamer program.

You can say that this community doesn't represent "everyone" potentially playing his site, and on the surface that's correct. However, this thread is inhabited by a lot of very experienced online poker grinders who know what they want, and even some who have a fair idea what the recs want. When there is universal panning of your site, after initial excitement and positivity, you know that you're doing something very wrong.

The focus now should be, "How do we totally change course and salvage this?", rather than, "We made the right decisions and just need some more time."

The truth is that, even if they fix the bugs, get MTTs working, get the resizable tables going, and implement hand histories, there still isn't much on this site which is going to attract a large following by word-of-mouth.

You've written 100s of articles? Who are you?

Mason

iirc correctly you have said there is a problem today with nlhe especially compared to (limit) holdem which is that the better players win too much. I have criticized you by saying you claim to base your conclusions on reason but you have never put forth your evidence or data nor have I seen any. You haven't stated what the target for "winability" is or how you have, or would, measure(d) it.

Stars has the most of this data and they only release it to players that sign ndas and even those players said "they can't comment but they don't agree with the conclusions"

For those who are unable to access RIO Poker due to country-wide restrictions, RIO Poker at this moment has:

NLHE: 4 players --- PLO: 3 players
TOTAL = 7 players

Thanks for bringing this up. I was going to ask this too because I'm interested in reading the content.

Read our published books, especially our new one coming out on June 1, The Theory of Poker Applied to No-Limit by David Sklansky. You'll see plenty of explanations.

You need to identify who you are. Given that you have published 100s of articles on this subject, I would think this is something you would want to do.

Mason

I look forward to this and the relevance. I criticize the timeliness in regard to your statements though. You made those statements with no empirical data or given basis etc.

I just logged in minutes ago and was permabanned with the explanatioon "undesirable". Im not disclosing without an endorsment from maven and/or boba fett. You and DS are important and your NVG is run by a cabal.

You live in the freest nation in the world and you are not free to be served poker with regard to the global player pool. You are not intelligent if you cannot admit this is a problem.

Your citizenry cannot even play with the rest of the world and your mods are hell bent on shutting me up!

I thought this was written by Amazon Page?

Diablo you have written 100s of articles, but you haven't mastered the apostrophe?