Phil responding like a madman in the 2+2 NVG thread about his site.
For awhile, he ignored it.
Between 2+2, the DAT appearance, the blog, and the Twitch streaming, he's clearly engaging in an all-out publicity blitz to get the site on its feet. Not a bad idea, but that alone won't save it.
Interestingly, he won't respond to me at all in the thread. I've been cordial in the thread and never personally insulting to him or the site, but I've been pretty tough, so I'm guessing he is pissed and won't acknowledge me. I don't really care. It's just funny. Either that, or my comments are too difficult to craft a good response to, so he's skipping them.
There's another guy in the thread posting way more than I am, named The_Jackal21. Jackal is in Europe and actually plays on the site. He posts a lot of constructive criticism, but again in kind of a tough manner. Phil responded to him once, and now seems to be ignoring him, too.
I think the problem is that Phil's ultimate plan is to mostly stay the course and give the illusion of being open to change, so it's hard to respond to big time critics who feel that a major change is necessary to succeed.
And then there's troubling statements like this:
Originally Posted by
Phil Galfond
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If you think you're getting less than 51% in EV, who do you (by you I mean any grinder) think is getting more than 51%? Someone has to. If you and two other players are only getting 21%, then the other 3 players at the table get 81%, or two get 51% and one gets 141%, etc.
The money is being given out and has to go somewhere.
I'm not understanding how pros, who have to have a good understanding of expected value and variance, don't see this as a lot of money in their pockets.
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All that said, it's clear that I'm wrong about everyone understanding EV the way that we do, and as such, we're completely failing on the very important marketing front that is optics.
We have rake much lower than major competitors yet a subset of players think it's higher - that's an absolute disaster, and a big failure for us.
It's something that we didn't see coming from the reg community and we're going to have to do a lot of thinking about how to address, what previously planned changes to bump up the priority list, and what new changes to make to our pricing/rewards.
Bolding is mine.
So there's still more of these condescending statements, blaming the grinder/customer for being too stupid to understand how wonderful their promotion is, rather than blaming themselves for coming up with something which just isn't exciting people.
That doesn't bode well for his level of introspection, or the future of the site.