After almost 8 years in this industry (first as an entrepreneur/business owner, and later as a player), I've decided to leave this scene behind. I'm going to go chase my childhood dream of building video games.
Some of you already know bits and pieces of the Pokerspot story. Pokerspot was conceived in late 1999 in a hot tub behind my Silicon Valley apartment. My brother Dutch had graduated law school and had been playing poker in the casinos all summer. I was working for a major Internet service provider building out a high-speed Internet backbone. After watching Dutch play on (the biggest and only real money site at the time) Planet Poker, and realizing the giant hole in their feature set (omaha, stud, stt/mtts), we decided to launch the spot.
Many of you have wrongly held my brother personally and solely accountable for Pokerspot's unraveling -- as if he had single-handedly devised a plot to launch a would-be successful cardroom, met with some huge initial success, and in the greatest act ever of prematurely leaving a great game, absconded with half a million in player deposits rather than continue to grow a successful company in an industry undergoing explosive growth. Most of you are probably intelligent and mature enough to realize that a company like Pokerspot calls for the efforts of a major team, and that even though Dutch has taken it upon himself to disregard one of the biggest reasons for the formation of a corporation (limiting liability) in paying back a small percentage of the players thousands of dollars out of his own pocket -- he has absolutely no reason to do so. Personally I hope he stops. My feeling on it is that anyone that had the balls to buy into a poker site in an entirely unregulated industry (remember it's the year 2000) deserved what they got (and why would you be playing with money you couldn't afford to lose in the first place?). But, that's because Dutch is a nice guy and I'm an [censored].
I left behind a promising career in a legitimate industry to start the site. Pokerspot was built on a budget of $80k that we had to borrow out of family coffers. My parents lost more money on the venture than the top dozen or so players did. I've had almost 8 years to come to terms with the fact that even though we were the first site to offer multi-player tournaments, even though we'd done so much to define the online poker industry at large, it was not in the cards for me to pull down tens of millions of dollars like my competitors had. I'm pretty much over it by now, but sometimes it still stings. We all took risks, and we all lost out. But it's ok. Money can't buy me love.
After NetPro Ltd. and ePayment Solutions both went belly-up after mass chargebacks from mostly casino/sportsbook traffic (and both probably suffering a "run on the bank"). After we tried unsuccessfully to offload our assets to companies like CyberWorld Group / Golden Palace (who inked a $1m deal with us to cover player liabilities along with small amount of candy for our shareholders) who reneg'd only after recruiting my senior developer and effectively stealing our source code. After all of this, we stopped working on Pokerspot, and we tried to stop caring. At some point you've just got to chalk up the loss, learn what you can, and move on.
So that's we did. We left the business world behind and started to really play some cards. Dutch went to battle it out in the '03 WSOP and made enough money to rent our 5 bdrm place (the card castle) in Culver City, and form the crew. A little campy? Maybe.. but I defy anyone reading this to refute that our small group of friends really has changed the poker world (and I believe for the better).
4 years of this, and I've learned enough to know that for most of us there's no bright light at the end of the tunnel. The winningest player I know was flat broke two months before his windfall tournament victory, and along with the skill he'd been building for almost half of his life, he had to enjoy a good amount of luck to win. Walk into any major tournament going on in the country, identify the "professionals", and I'm telling you that half of them are buried in makeup and living a nightmare of maintaining a winning image just to keep the interest of their current and future backers.
No, the real winners are the operators, the casinos, and the media. Even the niche appendant companies like the affiliate marketers, the clothing lines, and the video training sites.
They're juicing you so hard that it's amazingly difficult to make it as a player. Oh, the winning players are out there too, don't get me wrong. There are the phenoms. But I hold that if the numbers were really published, and the companies were operating transparently.. well.. I think Andrew Jackson put it best (even though he was speaking toward the establishment of the Federal Reserve -- which makes it sort of ironic that his face graces our $20 bill now) when he said:
"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out... If people only understood the rank injustice of the money and banking system, there would be a revolution by morning."
I've almost completely lost faith in all of you to wake up and smell the coffee and help yourselves. Organize. Unionize. Strike. Demand lower rake and health benefits. God knows the overhead of operating these sites is nowhere near the amount of money these greedy bastards are stealing from you. Your beloved pros, the people you champion, they started their own sites and they're sticking it in you too. You'd better make some serious changes.
Dutch tried to hand this to you on a silver platter years ago. I remember how excited he was when he imagined Rakefree, and he hoped that it would finally clear his name. You all heckled him and threw our previous mistakes in his face. In an act of cowardice, Pokerstars banned him over it.
So, that's it. I'm done. Finito. But before my exit, allow me to make this one last act which may or may not have any effect on the industry. If not, I don't really care. I'm moving on to bigger and better. I think after you make it deep enough in the poker world (assuming we maintain the status quo, anyway) -- I think you'll develop a sick feeling in the pit of your stomache over it too.
We've talked it over, and we're opensourcing the pokerspot code. It's ancient and ugly, but it should lower the barrier to entry and eventually maybe it will have the desired effect of eliminating the rake altogether and making poker a fair game for the players. Information wants to be free. So here. Come and get it. E-mail me if you need help.
http://code.google.com/p/pokerspot/source
Robert Boyd (aka TC_Clueless)
[email protected]
