Quote:
Originally Posted by mystery_man
The site that Esfandiari was pitching for is owned by the Fertitta brothers. They also own The Station Casinos in Vegas, and they own Zuffa (which owns The UFC).
It is only available for Nevada residents at this time, but is supposed to come to New Jersey (intrastate means separate player pools, however).
The idea is that The UFC is watched by a huge audience of males, 18-36, and perhaps many of this audience would be interested in trying their hand at poker.
On the surface this may seem like a good idea, but when you really look at the numbers and data I just don't see his poker site doing well
.
Poker sites are all about having a big enough player pool. Its kinda like the chicken and the egg arguments.
You can't have a good poker site without a big player pool. You can't get a big player pool without having a good poker site...
Assuming that 1% of the population plays online poker. Nevada has close to 3 million people. So 1% of 3 million people equals just 30,000 people. Out of that 30,000 people lets say Esfandiari's site gets 25% of that market share. Now we are talking about 7,500 people. But those people aren't all going to be playing at the same time, they will be popping in and out, playing days, nights, weekends, etc depending on mood and their schedules. The number of players will fluctuate between 5% and 30% of this total population during off peak and on peak times. So the player pool would range from 300 - 2,500 players...
When you spread that number across all the various games and limits available in typical online poker that is just not a big enough number to sustain a vibrant poker population. What will end up happening is players will log on, see that no one is really on the site and they will just log off. Kinda like the problem some night clubs have. People come to the night club, see that its "dead" and that there aren't many people there and then they just leave and go to the more popular night club that is always packed...
In the US, a state by state approach to online poker (i.e. opening up state specific online poker sites) will never yield any worthwhile profitable fruit. The only money to be made by this approach is by Stars or FT or some other big international online site worming their way in and opening a bridge from the desolate US online poker landscape to the vibrant International poker landscape.