We live in era where new technological innovations are unleashed on an almost weekly basis. If your product is on the Internet and you’re not innovating than one of your competitors is and you’re product could become obsolete in the blink of an eye.
Think about it, we live in an age of tablets, all-in-1 desktops, 3-D televisions, Amazon TV, Netflix, smart phones, and yet just 10 years ago if you owned a cell phone, a DVD player, an MP3 player, and a Palm Pilot (remember those) you were cutting edge.
Remember what a website from 2004 looked like? Compare that to the sleek, interactive designs of today. Even a free blog template from 2014 blows away some of the most highly developed websites from 2004.
All that being said, one industry that hasn’t been able to continually make these types of advances is online gambling. There is little difference between Party Poker or PokerStars circa 2004 and say Ultimate Poker circa 2014—most would argue the 2004 sites mentioned are actually better.
Sure there are new features like Zoom Poker, synced breaks, and other tweaks, but visually there isn’t much difference.
This is really a shame.
My biggest hope for legal online poker in the United States was that the companies involved would start fresh and there would be an iPhone vs. Android type of arms race in terms of innovation. I didn’t want these sites to be just another leg in the Olympic Torch relay, I wanted them to be different, to be the Antonio Rebollo of online poker, someone who changed how things were done and forced all other Olympic cauldron lightings from then on to be better.
Unfortunately, the companies that have entered into the US market have simply copied what came before them, both in terms of software (looks) and in marketing, and this sclerotic approach may be what is preventing them from pulling in those highly sought after casual players that could usher in another “Boom” period.
Where online poker rooms went wrong
During the early days of the Poker Boom players were enticed with easy to clear deposit bonuses. There weren’t any elaborate rakeback schemes or fancy promotions that needed a dedicated thread on 2+2 for people to explain what was going on. Online poker sites were looking for new depositors, not high-volume players.
But that all changed after UIGEA (it began before this but UIGEA was definitely the tipping point) when displaced players from PartyPoker and other sites were free agents of sorts, and affiliates and poker rooms desperately wanted their business, which led to the “open” affiliate marketing and the term “rakeback” going from an underground poker term to mainstream.
Unfortunately, in my opinion anyway, they went too far, and in appealing to high-volume players they turned off casual players –casual players who were already becoming disillusioned thanks to the increasing difficulty of funding their account and the new “gray” area online poker was operating in.
Suddenly poker was seen as a game of complete skill; players and advertisers were no longer marketing the game as a fun way to gamble with the possibility of a big payday if you caught the right cards at the right time. Post-2006 everything was about win-rates and grinders.
Like a baseball team that spends most of their budget on one big free agent signing the promotions and offers from online poker sites were only appealing to high-volume players.
What made this all the worse was that every site simply copied one another. Instead of innovation we simply saw more rakeback, or slightly bigger bonuses, or the “I can break your Guinness World Record then you can break it again and then I’ll try to break it again” contests between Full Tilt and PokerStars.
Is bwin.party about to buck the trend?
At least one person is looking to change this up, bwin’s “activist investor” and Las Vegas Sands board member Jason Ader — even though Sands owner Sheldon Adelson is one of the biggest opponents of online poker in the US Ader went ahead with the bwin.party investment.
Ader bought up most of Ruth Parisol’s shares in the company after she divested in order for bwin.party to get the go-ahead in the US and doesn’t think the company has done a very good job of exploiting their current position in online gambling, especially in the US and he wants to bring in some fresh blood.
With Ader forcing a Board of Directors shakeup bwin.party may be heading in a new direction; a direction that might allow the company to once again head to the top of the online poker world and perhaps force their peers to follow them and cause the iPhone/Android competition that every consumer pines for.
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