Would You Like To Own Part Of An Online Poker And Casino Business

This is what you shouldn’t do when launching a poker site. First note that:

Online poker is a $6 billion dollar a year industry.

The top poker rooms are making over $1 million dollars every day online.

The top poker affiliates make over $150,000 a month.

Let’s say you want to start your own poker room. You get on the the search engines and before you know it, you find two dozen or so companies that claim to be competent to help you. You don’t get something for nothing and you understand  their fees range from $100 up to a couple of million. You know you get what you pay for, so you start weighing the postives/negatives for these companies.

On the bottom end, you can get a website that is 99% replicated, and all you have to do is advertise it. When players sign up to play poker,  your website receives a percentage of the revenue that their play generates. In other words, you are basically an affiliate with little or no control of anything else. Except of course for limited marketing with the business. (Due to duplicated web content restrictions). On the high end, you can drop $1-$5 million dollars on fully created and customized gaming software. This will be created from scratch to match ALL of your needs. So, you’re out $1-$5 million and one to three years have passed while you waited around for the software to be finished. Now, it’s done and you are ready to start marketing and advertising. Once your marketing is ready to go, you need to hire at least 500 player props to play poker at your site. This is so your first 10 poker player customers have someone to play poker against. This is the hardest part when trying to reach and maintain the player liquidity.

Option C is to join a poker network. Contact several of the larger successful poker networks and you will find that they are very selective. You must know the gaming industry well, have a strong business background, and have a promising business plan for them to tear apart.  You will naturally have to pay them a royalty percentage of all revenue that your game players generate. They can set you up  within 6 months to a year  and provide somewhat customized gaming software.  They can instantly provide you with player liquidity. This means when your first 10 poker player signin to your poker website, they get pooled in with the other poker players from all of the poker rooms on the network. It typically costs about $200k-$1m to get started and the network will  want to see an operating/marketing budget  $2million+.

I found Option D.  I received a phone call from a sales rep at Future bet. I was given a professional and credible presentation. I verified some of their claims and became quite impressed. They claimed to be the only connection to the Poker Network. If you wanted to be a poker site on their Network, you had to go through them. They claimed to have been affiliated with Poker Room. Poker Room was the first official online poker website. They claimed to have a “special relationship” with the network that allowed them to offer a lower point of entry cost.. They proposed to build us a custom designed website which would be integrated into their network for $50,000. This would include access to their gaming license (a $50,000 additional value) because our website would be placed under their license. There would also be a royalty scale of roughly 8%-21% depending on monthly rake revenue. 

This sounded great.  we were going to receive a mostly custom poker website, have our poker room connected to their network, (providing instant player liquidity, pay them a small royalty commission, utilize their customer service for our player support, be able to tap into their processing for our player deposits/withdrawals, resulting in a Turn-Key poker business.

I raised $200,000 to get started. I met with the president of Future Bet Ron Katz) from Vancouver, Canada. I gave a check for $57,5000 and then waited for a few months patiently while our poker website mock-up was to be completed. I had made several additional customized website requests. They were very reasonable requests . I then received a call about three months later informing me that our site mock-up was done. When I viewed the mock-up, I was very un impressed, but it seemed like we were getting somewhere. None of our customized requests were completed. I was told that the requests would take additional time. I was assured they would be completed soon. I was then literally “threatened” to accept the site “as is” or it would be put to the bottom of the pile. we would have to wait several more months before the changes could be made which.  This would drastically delay the launch. Future Bet said this was due to other licensees sites still needing to be finished.

I reluctantly agreed and within three days, I had referred many people to our new poker site. It wasn’t close to perfect, but  figured it was good enough to get started. On the fourteenth day of launch, I recei ed an email from a player I signed up. He had won just over $2k. He had requested his withdrawal, and after a week, he was notified that the maximum payout was $2k per week.  He was told he would have to re-request his deposit in $2,000 increments. It would take a total of 10 weeks to get his money out. This was just the beginning. I got another phone call explaining that because of our large number of deposits (great news), we had to personally guarantee those deposits. Future Bet demanded an additional $15,000 reserve to be sent within one week or our poker site would be turned off.  we originally paid a $5k reserve. I reluctantly sent the money. Their story was somewhat convincing.

They said they weren’t our bank and we would be responsible for “floating” all deposits and withdrawals which could take up to two weeks.                                                                                                                                                            

This was another “red flag”.  I kept asking myself why wouldn’t this billion dollar empire float a lousy $15 -$20k for a two week period to cover the deposits. A short while later,  I received several more emails from clients and friends of mine who hadn’t received their cash out request from our poker site. These cash outs requests varied from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. This made no sense as we had now paid $20k total in reserves to cover and float these deposits/withdrawals.

Ron Katz gave me every reason why these things were happening. I was assured again and again that these problems would be fixed. After a few weeks players started informing me that they had started to receive some of their withdrawal requests. Things went smoothly for about a month. I received amother phone call from Ron katz explaining that he had an incredible marketing campaign in the works that only happened once a year. It was the most effective marketing Future Bet had ever found Ron boasted.  If we wanted a piece, we could get in for only $12,000. I was guaranteed of its effectiveness. I wired the money and the campaign NEVER went out.

The problems only got worse. I started receiving more emails. This time from other licensees asking if I had received any payouts from Future Bet. Come to find out, some of the licensees hadn’t been paid in months. we had never requested a payout from them because we never put much any money into marketing other than the $12,000 Future Bet stole from us. (Thank God) Needless to say we managed to lose over $100,000 with Future Bet. They lied about many of the representations they made. As it turns out, you can have a direct relationship with the OnGame Network without going through Future Bet. Why would OnGame even allow Future Bet to represent them? OnGame finally gave Future Bet the boot onve the problems really started to get out of hand. Future poker site operator beware of Future Bet.

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