I'm the guru of poker club apps. AMA

I'm FrYoungtrad, a doctoral student in pipe organ and live and club poker player/agent. Many poker players have dismissed club apps categorically, providing anecdotes about scams, moralizings about business practices, etc. I'm here to provide a more balanced and accurate perspective on clubs, tell you how they work, and how to make money playing in them and not get scammed. I have experience in all levels of poker club operations, including playing exploitatively, cashiering/accounting, security, recruiting, and union leadership. As a result, I have connections with all types of people in every area of the club space.

Club apps represent a massive, crazy underworld, and I have not noticed that side of the business talked about much. However, even after having seen what I've seen, I doubt that I will ever play poker outside of clubs and live. The RIGHT clubs are highly secure, highly profitable places to play, but it's a different business model and economy than what most poker players are used to. It's analogous to living in the affluent area of a city run by gangs instead of the police - your safety and wealth are guaranteed by a mercenary instead of a (perhaps far more corrupt and bureaucracy-laden) government entity. Depending on your situation, some city quarters run by cartels will offer you a far better place to set up your McMansion and picket fence with 2.5 children and a dog named Spot, than neighborhoods whose streets are constantly crawled by law enforcement. With the gambling hustle, should it be any surprise that it's the same way?

To cover most FAQs, I will tell you about how poker clubs work first, then move on to a section about the bots, and finally provide some tips on how to make money in clubs. Ask me anything you like about strategy, stats, practical advice, specific actors, etc separately below. Caveats: this is not a place to advertise clubs, so I will not do that in this thread. I will also not compromise anyone's safety through identifying information, whether they're well-known scammers or reputable superagents. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about clubs which do not deal with real money.

How do poker clubs work behind the scenes?

Poker clubs must be distinguished from the platforms upon which they are based. Platforms are phone apps like PokerBros and ClubGG (colloquially “Asian apps.”) The platform does not provide gambling services involving real money. Instead, platform developers make a profit from players by selling subscription services to special features like ratholing, access to site freerolls, additional time banks, decorative themes, etc. Importantly, platforms also sell special services to club owners, like security features, the ability to link clubs together into a union, or even charge clubs for the ability to dispense chips after a certain amount. Platforms do not provide or support real money gambling services. To buy or cash out chips in a given club, you exchange venmo, bitcoin, or some other real life currency for play chips.

Poker clubs are private rooms that players may join and choose from when they open the platform’s app. Depending on the platform, clubs may be linked together into a “union” in various ways. The union owners control what tables appear in every club belonging to it. For example, if Club A and Club B belong to a union together, players in Club A and Club B will find themselves playing against each other on the same cash tables and in [at least some of] the same tourneys. Union accounting is done on a weekly basis. If the players in Club A lose money in a given week overall to the players in Club B, the owner of Club A must pay the appropriate amount of those players’ deposits to Club B at “settle up” time so that the latter can cash out those players. A stop loss and security deposit system is employed by the union to ensure accountability. The union takes an amount (from 0-15%) of each club’s weekly rake to provide these services.

Unions are like corporations. Indeed, many of them have so much traffic that it is no exaggeration to say that they are direct competitors to the biggest official sites on the planet. Here are the different levels of the corporation. Note: “blue chips” are the chips kept behind the cage, used by agents and their oversight only. Blue chips can be freely exchanged 1:1 for red chips, which are the only ones that can be put on the tables.

1. Union leadership: One or more people may be shareholders in the union. Their most important job is providing security using tools provided them by the platform. Some unions have dedicated teams of well-compensated full-time staff for this purpose. They also conduct weekly settle up or provide for that settle up to be accomplished via AI, chatbots, part-time cashiers, etc. If the union uses bots, union leadership deals directly with the bot company to make sure they get paid, adjust the bots’ behavior according to the union's economy, etc. They can make administrative decisions like which countries are allowed to play, and settle disputes (for example, if a player is convinced by an agent to switch from another. This is called “poaching” and can have severe consequences.)
2. Club leadership: one or more people may be shareholders in a given club. They recruit superagents, agents, and players to the club. They are allowed to distribute blue chips on an unlimited basis to superagents and agents. They get a majority cut (85%+) of the rake generated by their club if they are unionized, or all if it if they aren’t. The club’s shareholders also may get a cut of another club’s rake if they recruited such club to the union. Usually, these club owners just sit back and make passive income, and don’t have to do that much. When club owners appear on tables, they are often recognized celebrities who dump chips to the players, but some of them are good players. If a club is independent (not unionized,) they have far fewer tools available to them to provide security; however, there are also usually far fewer players in such clubs.
3. Superagents: recruit agents and players to clubs. They get a majority cut of the rake (65%-95%) from the agents and players they recruit, and sell blue and red chips to those under them.
4. Agents: recruit players to the club. Usually their cut is between 40%-80% of the rake generated by the players they recruit, depending on the type of action they bring. Bringing in losing action is always valued higher than more gross action. Agents may or may not be under a superagent.
5. Player: may only buy red chips, from any of the above entities. It’s up to their agent (who may or may not be a superagent or club owner) to decide whether they get rakeback, bonuses, etc. Basically, the serfs of the club poker space. If they recruit another player to the club, their agent should give them a lump sum bonus, but if they start recruiting more active players, they should be promoted to agent.

There are some immediately identifiable disadvantages to this business model. The biggest one is that accountability can be difficult, resulting in the possibility of scams. Especially up until about a year ago (and even ongoing in smaller startup clubs) an agent could theoretically take your deposit and never cash you out, or a club could leave a union and never pay the union at settle up time. (Usually, the player or whoever is compensated out of security deposits when this happens.) Also, a club owner can load themselves unlimited red chips (like a casino owner) and dump on the tables and find themselves in more debt than they can handle. Cashiers who handle the venmo, zelle, paypal, btc, etc. can also walk away with the money. I saw this happen once. The club owner threatened to fly out to where the cashier lived and kick his ass and the club wound up getting the money back.

However, things have gotten much better in the past year or so. To explain, I will return to my analogy about the neighborhoob run by a cartel. It is one thing to scam someone according to the law: you might get caught and serve your time. However, if a gang scams another gang, the kickback of vigilante justice will be orders of magnitude stronger. Thus, as people have gotten to know each other in the club space as the apps themselves have recently advanced, everyone knows everyone and their history; reputation is a currency unto itself. If you have a good reputation, you will get highly rewarded, and if you screw up, redemption is extremely difficult. Most agents and clubs see the long-term profit of keeping a high raking player loyal, so stealing deposits is not a profitable scam anymore. These days, when issues occur, usually it’s at the superagent level or higher, like when club owners irresponsibly load more credit than they can handle and then can’t cash out their players. Even in that case, which is rare but significant when it does occur, it becomes a logistics issue of dispensing that club owner’s security deposit to the right people: only agents have communication access to their players. Doesn’t this sound at least marginally better than getting scammed by some company run out of Malta that then collapses and it takes decades to get only a small portion of your money back?

I offer that this business model, strange and rickety as it may seem, is a much more effective and human way of dealing in the poker industry than what we usually encounter. What casino would offer you money to bring your buddy into their poker room, before immediately making hundreds off him? Instead of being raked to death by a greedy corporation, regular players are offered rakeback, and the agent shares in admin duties in exchange for a small cut. He will also be held accountable by his boss and peers, unlike the CEO who gets bailed out. The best agents provide intangible rewards, providing player reads, letting you know when the game is good, being a bro in general, and so forth. Where else does the casino owner sit down at the table and start blasting off stacks? It’s becoming clearer that as the business model I described is refined over the years, it is becoming a peer-to-peer, grassroots style of keeping one sector of the poker economy healthy rather than an arena for scammers. There’s no commission or legal entity keeping track of any of this, yet within this system, I trust a large amount of my money with real people I’ve never met, and they trust me with theirs.

How do the bots work?

Bots have become a huge problem in the online poker industry, and the club world is no exception. Club bots, of course, are entirely legal, available for anyone to purchase, and advertised openly online. The most advanced ones are created by a company out of Russia, a huge corporation with teams of staff dedicated to different aspects of club poker economics, bot development, and even anti-bot measures. They seem to have a similar business model to the clubs themselves, as I get different agents for the bot companies reaching out to me on a weekly basis selling their wares (unsuccessfully, of course.)

The first bots came out when AI started becoming a thing. They operate on an adaptive machine learning model combined with what must be massive, extremely expensive, highly academic field studies of tens of billions of hands. This database of hands alone must require a team of professionals, including software developers and scientists to manage and interpret to train the bots correctly. Or perhaps they use AI for all that, I don’t know. However, it is striking to consider the amount of investment and data collection that must have gone into developing such an advanced piece of software for such a specific application.

Anyway, the bot companies charge one cent per hand (per bot, I think?) plus a cut of union profits. The point of the bots isn’t necessarily to beat real players at the game, depending on the customer. You can hire the company to make it seem as if there are tables full of real players in your club/union, but force the bots to only break even in the long run. I recently acquired a small union in which most of the players online (around 8-12 full tables, including PLO5) were bots, with only one or two real players appearing on the tables per day. Of course, the union is terminated, and I did not profit from it in its short existence under my ownership, but I hope to use the data in a way that benefits the community. The point is that it serves as an example of how the bots can operate. In another case, I played in one club which became overrun by bots after a while (this was in the early days of the bots’ existence.) I mentioned this to a recreational player who wanted to play there, but he didn’t care, and just kept putting in action there. He preferred it to the bot-free clubs.

The bots do share hole cards and hand data with each other, adapting as a group to every real player’s style. When they learn their opponent’s style, they become quite difficult to beat. They employ a limp-heavy strategy based on field data which is difficult to tackle from a theoretical perspective without similarly sized mounds of data. To hope to beat them, you have to change your style frequently to remain unpredictable. I would like to know how big their card sharing edge is in NLH; or how much it depends on how many bots are on the table. In the early days, I played some very, very weird hands against them (like xc oop, xc, x with total air no draw,) and found some significant leaks inherent to their software, but I’m sure those have since been patched.

I only play and agent in clubs that are bot-free, and those clubs are still abundant.

Dealing with the bots has prompted some interesting thoughts for me. At first, I was explicitly against the development of poker bots altogether. But of course, club bots aren’t inherently evil. They are fascinating spectacles of software which reflect a collaboration going on in the poker world which in and of itself can just as well help the community. The moral issue lies in the fact that most of the time, when real humans sit at a virtual table in a pro-bot club, they might not know which players they’re facing are real, and which are bots. Ironically, a recreational player might be just as happy playing a bot as they would be facing a real player, even fully conscious of the fact that the villain is nothing more than an AI-based simulation. Any reg, too, knows that stacking a bot is extremely satisfying. Like it or not, the bots are changing the poker economy as we know it, and they are here to stay. It is possible for anyone to hire this Russian company to fill a club with bots and make it seem like a big operation full of real players, and resultingly, anyone can enter the club space at a higher level now. Is there a fair and moral way to incorporate bots into club poker? For example, can we imagine a future where is it more acceptable for a club owner to employ a bot to break even or lose as a prop player, than it would be for that owner to stake a nit human to get the game started, as long as the bot is clearly and publicly marked as such?

You sold me; I’m enthralled with the idea of poker clubs now. How should I get started?

The best clubs will be run by and contain players who you know IRL.

Failing that, the most secure and reliable clubs are smaller ones that run scheduled/nightly games, because those are more likely to involve players who know the owner personally, increasing accountability. If you wish to play in a larger club or union, ask for references from union leadership about your agent and what type of security they have. Reputable union leaders will be THRILLED to offer this information to their players and agents.

Always ask for RB. Know that if you recruit several regular players to a given club, you should be offered an agency deal. Do not accept a high minimum rake amount to receive RB. Don’t bother shopping around for RB/agent deals within a club/union; this will just get you a bad name and/or reported.

Never buy player contacts, club or union shares. This is always a scam.

At least communicate, if not have a relationship with club/union leadership before depositing.

Hand grabbing/PT import software, like EliteHud, along with emulators like LDPlayer9, are against the rules.

Sometimes big withdrawals take a long time. Don’t freak out if it does, even if you deposited 5000 moments ago and just want to withdraw 2500. Probably, the club/union used the 5000 to settle up a guy peer-to-peer owed 20,000, and you’re in line to be fulfilled likewise peer-to-peer. In other words, it’s not that the money has disappeared, it just takes time to move the money in a risk-free fashion for everyone’s protection.