USA Online Poker - Sweepstakes Model or Blockchain Model?

Blockhain is the future, for now.

Sweepstakes currently banned in my state and a few more of them. No reason it can't be banned in others over time.

edit: you don't think we can continue waiting for the government to sort this stuff out? Its been 13 years, we now have legal sports betting in 38 states! There is a little bit more going on then legal red tape. If there was a killing to be made in online poker we would have been side by side with sports betting.

Blockchain

The nice thing about sweeps sites is they're limited to USA (permitted states) plus Canada (boooo) where bitcoin sites allow ROW.
I mean...as an American preferring fishy games 😀.

I'm on SWC and the software is actually really nice imo, big buttons/bet slider bar, so much better than Global Poker/Ignition, so I hope it gets more traffic in the future.

+1 on SWC. really sad to see such low traffic

I think it’s hard for grey market sites to operate with just poker. They need to offer more casino options.

Multi-channel gambling offerings have a revenue potential and a competitive advantage over poker, the red-headed stepchild of the gambling industry, both live and online.

The return to an operator after the expense of payment processing and operations explains WHY no operator is anxious to open poker up, and invite in competition from skilled poker players for dollars attracted and deposited by crappy poker players.

Mere sports bettors as a group get slaughtered when they sit at a poker table. Studied the issue about 20 years ago with actual data, it was a bloodbath. Much worse for sports bettors than even for newbie poker-only players.

Phil Ivey was a great poker player but a really lousy sports and casino player. Same for TJ Cloutier.

....

Blockchain-based actual operations face huge issues:

1. latency,
2. the sheer number of "transactions", even in single poker hand.
3. payer adoption (although players need not really know the game engine is crypto or blockchain based.

Google Decent.bet if you want a laugh at Helmuth's endorsement video.

Fwiw, SWC was busted by Nevada and run out of town, down to Antigua.

GG just spent half a billion on the WSOP specifically to get into the US online poker market that they'd never be allowed to otherwise enter. We're closer than we've ever been and in less than 6 months we'll have at least 1 site with 5-6 states connected (WSOP) 2 other sites that will have 3+ states connected.

The sweeps stake model is already getting banned all around the country as legal online gambling goes into effect. It's a dead path forward, but serves as a nice options while we wait. Seems WPT is going to take over that side of it and I assume they'll transition to a regular set up once it's viable to do so, smart plan.

Where'd you get that data 20 years ago?

you shoudl checkout how phenom poker has done blockchain poker.. Gasless transactions paid for by the site. You never see them.

Neither. Apps probably will be most common form for a while since games are moving to exclude players/make smaller pools not being inclusive and completely open to cheaters/bots/etc.

Americans in general will always gravitate to live poker over online I think even if legislation changes. The crowd it’s attracted since Black Friday predominantly prefer live poker

Do you think they've preferred live because of......black Friday? Most of these people either A.) Don't trust the offshore sites B.) Don't know how to get money on and off or C.) Have no idea they exist.

Global poker was booming when they had paypal, as soon as it went away the games got worse. The friction of depositing is a big deal.

Don't disagree with you, most people do prefer live, but if there was legitimate online poker since BF the sites would be huge.

We need unregulated options. Regulated sites seem to have a bad habit of charging high rake and making it more about corporate profits, which contributes to ruining the game.

Need an unregulated site that meets the following:

1) Easy to deposit / withdraw
2) Game Security
3) Beyond reach of regulators/legislators
4) Decentralized if possible

I think ACR is the closest to achieving this but they’re also pretty far away with all the bots around. Crypto deposits need to be made more straightforward to get more recs online.

The newly launched BetRivers Poker seems to have the most player friendly model - which is what we really need. Given all else is equal, regulated sites are better, but like I said earlier it seems they’re getting greedy (exception BetRivers). Really hope BetRivers succeeds & forces the other platforms to be more player friendly.

Issue is the skill gap from live to online is too big. Even in soft apps people complained about them being worse games than live games and was the main factor for people quitting. People who think online poker will make a resurgence have skewed views because they want something but in reality from the perspective of the average poker player in America now a days online is not desirable.

Live poker used to not be available in a lot of markets which caused online poker to thrive… nowadays it’s everywhere except nyc really and nyc can go to sands or parx or borgata w/e

Yes if they were as enthusiastic about online poker as they were with sports betting they could get something meaningful done. I just don't think politicians care about it

10/20 (~200nl) action on SwC
25/50 has also been running some

Is that 10/20 of a native token or $10/$20 equivalent of BTC on SWC? @Ralph

"for now ?",

Bold statement , except the "future" always will become the present, time is funny that way.

It’s the usd equivalent of $1/2 but more like big blind $1.80 to be exact
SwC uses its own conversion of btc to chips. No native token

lol, I'm pretty f**king old.

I started in the online poker industry well over 20 years ago.

Euphemistically speaking, "My partners have always made money"