The reality is in this hyper regulated BS paradigm, Ultimate poker cant do any upgrades your poker client without going through a ton of legal red tape.

Fact is that any change done to the software has to get approved even if its something mundane. The approval processes to do any upgrades/tweaks is long and of course expensive.

So even if they wanted to address complaints about their software, they have to spend a ton of time to get some paper pushing idiot's approval.

Typical byproduct of a hyper regulated paper pushing artificial market where too many people who don't know or care about online poker get paid to complicate every single aspect of the business from start to end.

In unregulated markets there will always be a brand that is willing to stake its future on running a proper business without risking their reputation. The market for online poker regulates itself because no one wants to play on a crooked site. US based sites could operate unregulated and shady enterprises could be sued if operated on US soil.

Even shady Bovada knows you just ship the checks and provide ok customer service and the rake will keep coming.

The hyper-regulated market will destroy online poker and then everyone will finally be safe.

Does not help matters that the CEO of Ultimate was a dithering baby who pointed his finger at every possible external situation as the problem.

No innovation, no problem solving, no resolve, no personal responsibility. Just blame everything around you as your company goes down in flames.

Stop the world.....I'm getting off

You should take a quick look at Amayas Q3 2014 Financial Results.
http://www.amayagaming.com/investors/

Note 34. lists general and administrative expenses, including salaries and fringe benefits.

...not to mention the geolocation bull****. It should be quick and easy for players to jump on the site and the more roadblocks there are the less players there will be.

Hopefully this will serve to increase traffic on WSOP.com - clearly there is only room for one online room in NV due to the size of the player pool. Still, sad to see them go...

Obviously, there were massive liquidity issues being NV-only but they made some wrong choices. They used a legacy product which brought a legacy team, that didn't work so nicely with the "new" company from what I heard. The offices were also divided between the Bay Area and Las Vegas.

Plus the legacy product was awful, they never had an OSX client, no mobile and they rushed to be "first" and it cost them heavily.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, the effect will be on WSOP.com.

I think the only states this could work in long term are larger states like California, New York, and Texas. Otherwise just too small a player pool. Also need to make verifying your location easier, having to do a bunch of complicated stuff with a cell phone is going to turn people off.

Get used to the cell-phone/wifi pings for iGaming Geolocation. It's only going to become more common, not less.

Won't the technology still take quite some time to catch up to what the US iGaming operators want to do ? My understanding was that only 1 in 4 players can actually play with the way it currently works?

Worst software ever. RIP

In a world where they should go maybe mobile only they go Windows only. If the software dosent support mobile friendly Fast fold/Spin and Go give up

Lol make sure your cell phone is with you? How is this complicated, log in and get location auto verified, seems like a huge hassle

What makes this even worse news is that other states see this and either back burner a run at inter-state online poker or not pursue it all all.....

any site going down that didn't scam people (that I'm aware of) sucks, there aren't many sites that sponsor US people playing poker these days.

but yeah combination of factors, only the one state that already has plethora of poker options that tourists are going to do instead, the name sounding like the former fraud site, and apparently the software were all contributors, it may not have had a shot just from the first point tho. Likely were betting on a few states that could share player pools and that never happened.

Man how dumb was it thought that they named it Ultimate Poker. I know they were married with the UFC brand but JFC I'm am American professional poker player and when I first heard the name I did a double take and had to check if they were affiliated with UB/AP. Just seems like a lot of players less in the know would have reservations, esp after all the mainstream coverage UB/AP received.

It's a pain in the neck having to login to the site, turn on the phone, download thing on phone, make sure phone is there, login on phone, etc etc etc. They have to know they're intentionally trying to choke the industry. (plus the need to own a cellphone or having one capable of this)

yeah definitely possible. Clearly needs multiple states and nobody's going to want to jump in if it looks like nobody else will. Like real life things.

I have doubts that ROW and US will ever play again on a legislated site here. Gov't doesn't want that $ leaving the country.

Get used to it. Add in handing over your last four of your SSN and a photo ID just to sign up.



+10000000000000

A lot of you aren't aware of the full truth of the situation.

Ultimate Poker was an ill-fated, mismanaged mess from the start.

While indeed the weaker than expected online gambling markets didn't help matters, most of Ultimate Poker's failure was their own doing. Even if you want to claim that Nevada's population can only support one poker site, that's certainly not true of the much larger New Jersey market. Despite that, UP was never able to grab more than 3% of the market share over there.

The failure of Ultimate Poker is a classic tale of clueless and arrogant upper management steering a sinking ship into a whirpool, and slapping the hands away of anyone below them attempting to correct the course.

Their first blunder was their insistence upon proprietary software. They paid a staggering $25 million to acquire software outfit CyberArts, for the purpose of developing the UP software. Proprietary software in an established industry is always a risk. While it affords you the chance to be innovative and exceed the offerings of the current marketplace, the new UP software did neither. CyberArts simply wasn't up to the task. They developed a product which was in fact inferior in several ways to the Planet Poker software in 1999.

The second major blunder was their obsession regarding being first to market. First to market can indeed be a huge advantage in industries where brand loyalty is common, and online poker is definitely one of those industries. However, such loyalty can only be established if your customers are happy with your product. If your product is severely flawed, being first to market will backfire, as your customer base will be chomping at the bit to immediately jump to the competition as soon as it exists. That's what occurred at UP. They released a highly flawed product which was also light on features, and somehow expected brand loyalty despite that. It is unclear if they simply did a poor job testing, or if they were aware of the numerous issues and decided an early launch was still the correct way to go. From what I have heard, it was the latter, but I believe they also were unaware of just how bad the software was. In any case, their product was very poorly received, and it was an inauspicious start for Ultimate Gaming.

Third, they did a poor job correcting the issues brought to them by their player base. While it is true that all software changes had to be approved by the gaming control boards, that's not the reason they failed to fix the software. They just weren't giving priority to the matter, and were closing their ears to the loud player feedback received both here and elsewhere. If you recall, when former UP Pro William Reynolds mocked them on his Twitter, he mentioned the fact that he sent them a long list of things to improve, and how they implemented none of them. Reynolds felt that they were more obsessed with silly social media campaigns than putting out a good product, which sadly was mostly true. Indeed, most of their software updates did not contain fixes for the software's bugs and annoyances (including minor, easy-to-fix ones), and the player pool got frustrated with it.

Fourth, their marketing was beyond poor. They refused to accept that they were slipping into the abyss and take drastic action. Their entire business plan was to simply stay the course and hope things improve on their own. No groundbreaking promotions. No hiring of props. No insane rakeback deals or rewards for game-starters. Finally, in their last few weeks of existence, they finally got a small clue and tried some 11th hour promotions to get some traffic. This included a rakefree 2-5NL game and a $10,000 bad beat jackpot at 0.25/0.50NL or higher. It was too little, too late. Their fate was sealed.

That brings me to my final point. Ultimate Poker had a lot of talented people on board. Many of these people were known to be intelligent, in touch with the wants and needs of the poker community, and some had even worked successfully at other online poker companies in the past. They seemed to have an A Team of employees, so what happened? How did this immense fail occur?

Upper management handcuffed them. This mostly was the doing of CEO Tobin Prior, but Chairman Tom Breitling had a hand in this as well, as did a few others. Basically, the poker people were not allowed to be poker people. Their input was ignored. Their suggestions were overruled. Their innovative solutions to fix the collapsing company were laughed off. The arrogant upper management at UP felt that they knew best, and that their poker community underlings had no clue how a successful poker site should work. That's tragically hilarious if you think about it. UP failed mostly because managers with little-to-no poker experience refused to listen to those with 10+ years experience in the industry.

Nearly everyone involved with UP on their April 30, 2013 launch date was long gone from the company by the time they closed today. These people mostly quit, though a few were fired. Many of these people quit despite not having another job lined up. They just couldn't take it anymore. It was that bad over there. I was told that it was one of the most frustrating, toxic work environments you could imagine. Even gentle, softspoken Terrence Chan walked out. It's not like legalized online poker jobs are plentiful. The fact that most of their staff walked out shows just how awful it really was over there.

While Ultimate Poker's failure has been apparent to many for a long time, this closure surprised people because the company was hoping to bide its time until major market states (like California) would legalize online poker. The fact that this goal has been abandoned, perhaps just a year off from California legalized online poker, shows how badly this whole effort was hemorrhaging money, and how little faith the parent company had in the whole situation. Basically, this was a fail which cost them tens of millions of dollars, and I can't imagine the existing UP software being able to sell for very much money (if at all).

It is easy to blame this on "the market", but that's simply not what occurred here. It's just a part of the story. The bigger part of the story involves empty suits thinking they knew poker better than those with connections to the community, and the catastrophic results that followed.

Wut? This was never a thing on any site in NV or NJ.

For a while in NV and NJ you just needed to have your phone turned on. Now, they don't even use phones anymore.

GG now its on to ACR and wsop.

Are there any upside to this news? It feels like another nail in the coffin of online poker to me.

He's easily the dumbest poster with and 04 join date.

interesting read. thanks for posting. sounds like it was a frustrating place to work.

There actually is an upside.

Future online gaming operations in the US might (and I stress MIGHT) learn from this fiasco, and leave a lot more decision-making power in the hands of knowledgeable industry people. That is ultimately the key to success, though this may be a non-issue if Pokerstars enters the market, as they obviously know the industry better than anyone. However it will still be an adjustment for the brass at Stars, as running an upstart state-level room is a far different endeavor than a giant international site like they currently have.

Yes, they have their regional sites, but that's still not the same.

Just going to leave this here.



That guy is just so full of himself it's unreal. I can't imagine working there and handling customer complaints/suggestions.