Less for more

For two decades before I found poker, I worked in IT. That’s a broad umbrella for a wide variety of different niches in which I saw the same pattern over and over again. Into every new niche piled an array of competitors. Over time, one emerged dominant to achieve a near monopoly. At that stage, the game was over. With near 100% market share in a stagnant market, the winners inevitably came to one conclusion: the only way to increase profits if you can’t increase sales is to increase your prices and reduce your costs. Leave them wanting more mutated into giving them less for more.

About a decade ago, I had this conversation with a bunch of beasts that included Max Silver and Nick Abou Risk, both of whom worked in online poker sites before turning pro. The general consensus was my gloom merchant’s take could not apply to poker. At the time the reputation of the market leader, PokerStars, was at an all-time high. Their handling of the aftermath of Black Friday had justifiably won them the gratitude and plaudits of the online poker community.

effectively stole from their most loyal customers

The general view of them as the white knights of online poker didn’t last. A couple of years later the Scheinberg founding family sold out to Amaya. Disastrous decisions followed dubious practices as they axed their winning live brands (European Poker Tour and a slew of local tours) and effectively stole from their most loyal customers when they axed the Supernova Elite program late in the year. They seemed to act with the arrogance of dictators, thinking their market dominance made them invulnerable.

A dying giant?

It didn’t make them invulnerable though. While the likes of Party scrambled to compete with renewed hope, the game wasn’t over. Universally loved nice guy Phil Galfond rushed off to create a would-be competitor. A real challenger emerged from the East in the form of GG. It moved into the position of market leader, and when you talk to GG people now, as I did at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) this year, they tell you they no longer even see PokerStars as a threat. They see a dying giant, flailing around trying everything to recover lost glories, and failing at every turn, hopelessly out of touch with both former and potential new customers. Whether they are right, only time will tell.

One thing is clear though: Stars is certainly trying again, and listening anew. The EPT and the regional tours are back, an attempt to regain lost customers and to listen to critical voices such as mine who tried to warn them in the past and to recreational players they solicit for feedback.

Live events were something they always did better than most if not all of their competition. They hire the best dealers, the best floor staff, and for now their live events and VIP teams blow away those of GG. In terms of customer experience if not prestige, EPTs easily beat the WSOP.

in Barcelona, the players were the ones wooed

At the WSOP this year, the GG focus seemed to shift from ordinary players and qualifiers who actually play on the site to perceived celebrities and industry people. They plied them with caviar at a players’ party that most of their players didn’t even get an invite to. By contrast, at the recent EPT event in Barcelona, the players were the ones wooed by ambassadors and live events staff, who left no stone unturned to try to better the player experience.

Old friends

As a poker pro, you make friends with your peers and competitors. You also make friends with the support staff around poker (dealers, floor staff, etc), people in the industry, and purely recreational players. Those mentioned in the last sentence tend to have a longer shelf life in the game than those in the preceding one, so over time the ratio actually shifts away from other pros.

One of my oldest (in longevity terms: I’m in no way suggesting she’s old) friends in poker is Rebecca McAdam. I’ve known Rebecca pretty much all my poker life, from her early days as a Cardplayer reporter through her days as the Irish Open interviewer (she was there when my good friend Ian Simpson popped the question after winning the Irish Open) through her Full Tilt days to Stars. We even interviewed her on the first season of the Chip Race. We kept in contact but when we ran into each other in Barcelona we realized, after much mutual head scratching, that we hadn’t sat down in person to chat since 2014 Monte Carlo.

Bex had risen through the ranks at Stars and is now a serious player in the industry. One of her pet projects is improving the lot of her gender in poker, along with participation numbers. She’s behind several genuine initiatives to do so. They all go well beyond just lobbing designer bags at the last women standing in ‘ladies’ events featuring 90%+ male participation.

The ladies event

Bex was in Barcelona to see the culmination of one such event: a ladies one table freeroll with a 30k platinum pass as first prize. In a way, I was there for the same reason: I’d originally decided to skip Barca figuring it was too soon after Vegas for me, but I changed my mind when one of the ladies in the event asked me to coach and help prepare her for the event.

an eclectic mix of successful pros

The women invited to take part were chosen for their efforts to inspire and encourage ladies in poker. This included an eclectic mix of successful pros like Giada Fang, Aurelie Reard, and Lexi Sterner (the first two of whom ended up proving that even in a fast-structured freeroll the cream tends to rise to the top when they got headsup), and committed talented and universally popular recs like Terry Hatchet and Chris Read, who does Trojan work with the Women’s Poker Association.

The event was originally planned for years ago, but the pandemic caused repeated postponements. I pointed this out to several people who expressed surprise at the inclusion of one or two of the competitors, and the absence of some very obvious candidates like Vanessa Kade, Jen Shahade, Maria Konnikova, Alex O’Brien, Katie Swift, Katie Stone, and Pokerbunny. Some of those were barely in poker when the nominations were taken, some like Shahade and Konnikova were disqualified by their association with Stars, while others like Stone just couldn’t make it there on the day.

Giada takes it home

On the day I was thrilled to see Giada take it down. Not only is she a former guest on the Chip Race, but she also translated my book PKO Poker Strategy into Italian. In doing so, she impressed both my co-author Barry Carter and I with her diligence and in-depth poker knowledge. She even found a few mistakes we and our team of expert reviewers had missed in the English original! I hasten to add we of course went back and corrected the English. But sufficeth to say Giada is someone who allows her hard work and results to speak for themselves, rather than relying exclusively on the “lady in poker” thing.

You make your own luck sometimes in poker

Some people suggested afterward she’d run well, and while that may be true (and she admitted it herself) she also played flawlessly. You make your own luck sometimes in poker, and by staying strong and disciplined in the early going when she was card dead, and winning the maximum with her big hands when they came, she was undoubtedly a deserving winner and will be a genuine threat in the 25k.

Who knows, she might even translate my latest book on ICM and final table strategy into Italian as part of her preparation.