Galfond seems like a nice and genuine guy, so I'm rooting for him to succeed.
With that said, it appears from the latest update that, unfortunately, nobody involved with this new site has any idea what they fuck they're doing.
The basic cliffs of his update:
- They had a software team working on the project which was slow and basically failed miserably
- They fired the software team and hired another one, which appears to be better. However, the new team says that the previous work was garbage, and they basically have to start fresh in order to build the great site Galfond and friends envisioned.
- Given that the site's ever-delayed launch date has become a running joke in poker, they've decided to launch with the crappy first software -- but only cash games, with no tournaments. Once the second version of the software is complete, they will relaunch it with tournaments also included.
While I feel for his position, and it's not an easy spot to be in, he should have just sucked it up and delayed it further.
We already saw what happened when a site opened early with terrible proprietary software, with the promise to improve later (Ultimate Poker).
By the time the new, better site is up and running, the word-of-mouth of the existing site will be bad, and no one will have an interest in showing up to play the new site.
We've already waited 2+ years for this site to come up. Might as well just make it a little longer and do it right, rather than rush to market with a failproduct.
Furthermore, I am not understanding the market for this site. Is it 2+2 type grinders? Even if players ignore the software's limitations, they will likely find that the games suck, because they will be playing other 2+2 grinders. I'm not seeing anything in their marketing strategy which will entice fish to play, and in fact Galfond is already claiming they are going to be "slightly favoring" the pro player over the rec player when it comes to rewards, which is already a sign of being clueless of the current market conditions.
Furthermore, cash games are often somewhat fed by tournament money. A tournament player wins big money in a donkament, then feels empowered to play cash games where he's dead money, and he gets crushed. So a lot of the money "won" in tournaments is cycled back into the cash tables, which is great for the poker site. This is a big reason why Pokerstars quickly exploded in popularity shortly after their 2002 launch. They were the first site to run tournaments (or at least the first one with any kind of decent traffic). Those tournaments fed their cash games, and the site grew exponentially.
Galfond is basically returning to the 1998 Planet Poker model by offering only cash games, and that's not at all a good look.
I think Galfond's team is probably missing a knowledgeable "industry guy" -- someone who understands what makes a poker site tick, what drives traffic, how the site's economy needs to stay afloat, and what the average player (both pro and rec) finds most important in a poker site.
It seems they are just shooting from the hip, without this knowledge. This is exactly the type of position I pitched for myself to Galfond -- an older, industry-wise guy who could use his nearly 2 decades of experience to say, "No, this is a horrible idea."
Not that it would have to be me. My radio co-host, khalwat, also would have been great for such a position, as would many other people with deep understanding of the online poker industry and the players who occupy it.
I'm not optimistic. This doesn't seem like it's going to work.