Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
Some of you might remember that I was close to working for UP, but it fell through.
In some ways, UP's failure has been surprising. They have a lot of intelligent people working there, including some veterans of online poker from both the player and employee standpoints. So what went wrong?
Yes, you can blame it on bad software, a saturated market, and better-recognizable competition, but it goes deeper than that.
I compare the UP team to a hastily-thrown-together NBA team of talented players. Individually, the team is full of talent and seems like it will crush. However, with poorly-defined roles, poor chemistry, and too many pieces with the same skill sets (and not enough with others), the team will underachieve.
I believe that occurred at Ultimate Poker. Individually they hired some great people, but it just didn't all come together properly. Priorities were wrong, communication with the community was poor, and worst yet, there was a complete lack of innovation when it came to providing the player base a reason to play at UP versus the "bigger guys". UP's basic model was to imitate Pokerstars and hope everything worked out, but that was the wrong approach for so many reasons.
They were never willing to step out of the box to set themselves apart. They were #2, but they didn't try harder.
And so they have mostly failed.
I'm not saying that I could have single-handedly brought them to the forefront of the industry, but I know I could have increased their traffic big time, had they put me in a management position and given me the ability to enact various changes.
I'm not bitter, by the way, nor am I happy to see their struggles. I have no probelm with UP, and I would still play there if they ever had LHE games going. I would have liked to have been given a shot to turn things around, but it was one of those things I didn't need, but would have been an interesting project/challenge to have been part of. Oh well.