I wouldn't dismiss GG's credit/agent business which either somewhat or totally propelled them to #1 while Pokerstars and others played by the rules.
Not many explanations for GG's meteoric rise.
What did they do that pokerstars didn't? Accepted crypto and accepted US players. Absence of any other explanation, I am going with this.
gg also became a good platform for private games, so independent hustlers/vloggers/etc recruited pretty hard for gg. that was a pretty smart move on their part. It prolongs the lifecycle of the game as it moved a lot of undeground rooms online.
lets be realistic here for a second. poker has been fading since it hit the peak in 2004-ish, long before before black Friday. It was still great for many years but volume just kept going down and winrates kept going down as well. That's the reality of this game. Smart money cashes out, dumb money goes broke and loses interest.
The very idea of trying to enter a dying industry is dumb. Galfond brought absolutely nothing to the table to reverse this trend. His site entered an established dying market with many existing strong players. It was just a dumb idea from day 1.
We have no transparency here as to who investors behind Galfond are and why they think entering an even tougher market makes sense. I also wonder how much skin Galfond actually has in this himself, or if he found some sucker investors to keep funding his project.
Phil Galfond does it again. Site sold for $5.8 million.
https://www.cardschat.com/news/phil-...active-108541/
Cha-ching!
Don't feel too jealous.
I believe the site lost a lot more than that during its time of operation. This project was one of Galfond's few failures. This was basically their offramp. It does put some money BACK in their pockets from this massively failed project.
It also allowed him and his team to get on a payroll for as long as Rush Street wants to continue with the project. It is possible that they plan to use the Run It Once software on a legalized US poker site, but it's also possible this was a Facebook-style "buy the competition and destroy them" move. In such deals, it's common for the owners of the smaller company to come with the package, where they are contractually obligated for a set amount of time to stay on, even if literally doing no work. There was even a gag about this in the TV series "Silicon Valley", where a bunch of these type of guys spent every workday eating snacks on the roof, while making big money to do so.
This is, of course, a better ending than Run It Once simply going away after shutting down. Indeed, the proprietary software does have value to an operator who might want to use it.
When it's all said and done, the project lost a lot of money (even after this sale), and Galfond is now a poker site employee, rather than owner. The guy has done great with pretty much everything he's tried, but this one didn't go as planned.
PFA got to be worth 2 million
Kind of Shocked he didn't do this earlier when he was playing online against that one guy a year or so ago. Interesting to see how this goes.
http://www.miraclecovers.com
"Donk down, that’s what you say to someone after they have lost 28K straight?" - Phil Hellmuth, online
BUMP
Two years later, Rush Street (the company which bought Run It Once) is actually trying to make a go at it: https://pokerfuse.com/news/industry/...oker-roles-us/
The Pokerfuse article seems to be a puff piece, so take it with a grain of salt.
They've already hired people to run the site, including a "tournament director", which might mean someone finally added tournaments to the software.
It will launch sometime this year, most likely, and will be in Michigan and Delaware, perhaps other places.
It will run via the BetRivers licensing.
I can't imagine this being successful, as no US-based online poker has succeeded in the nearly 11 years since the first one launched. They're all ghost towns.
It's fucking depressing that we are still so far away from online poker in this country. When Black Friday happened I honestly thought "Give it a couple years to hammer out legislation and Stars will be back".
Cant believe we're sitting here over a decade later with Bovada, ACR, and a few other peon site as our only options.
Im still hopeful if we can get one of the big four states to fall that might be the critical mass to make it happen. (Those big 4 being NY, FL TX and yes Cali although I have little hope California can get thier shit together. The damn Indians cutting their noses off to spite their faces when they could be making more money off the palefaces).
Its gonna take one of the bigger states to fall. Still disappointed that Online Poker was just left out when they did the major rewrite of the gaming compact between the tribes and the AZ Govt. That was the best biggest chance we had and with the Salt River Indian and the Gila River Indians both running successful Poker ops (TSR is the biggest poker room in the state and hosts the AZSPC every year). I thought the two of them would push for it and go into business since Poker is pretty decent here in AZ with waiting lists alot of time at not just TSR but also Wild Horse and a few others. Nope they got their class 3 full gaming to include live dealer roulette craps and other games and the subject didnt even come up. Hell they couldve possibly pushed for online gaming like DE and PA have Im betting and gotten it since the tribes legit make tons off gambling. I dunno if the sportsbook stuff coming in made them pause since its the first and only gaming the tribes have to compete with regular businesses with including the Cardianls and Suns (who both have sports books on their properties). To me they may have made a mistake since the door is now open for legal gambling that doesnt involve indian gaming potentially. (first year was over $1B wagered here in AZ but that may have been influenced by SB being here plus the usual big golf tournament thats every year. Will be interesting since March Madness culminates here this year with the Final Four at State Farm Stadium.
www.jokerstarspoker.com / www.jokerstarspoker.net / www.jokerstarspoker.eu
www.jokerstarspoker.club (not your mommas chinese poker app)
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