Failed Poker Projects
I’ve been involved in the poker world in one capacity or another since 2003. In that time, I’ve had a handful of poker-related business ideas that crashed before they ever got off the ground. I thought it might be fun (and a little painful) to rehash all of these failed ventures I’ve had through the years:
beatpokernow.com
This was the first failed poker website idea I had. The concept was basically just to create an online poker strategy portal. I had this idea in 2005. At the time, one of the reasons we threw in the towel was that the poker strategy website/affiliate market was really competitive. It just didn’t seem worth the work to try to penetrate the market. Of course, since that time, the market has gotten ridiculously more competitive. Looking back, we probably should have followed through on this idea and worked to crank out a nice site. I always thought the URL was kind of nice. I let it expire a few years ago and it seems as if someone else has picked it up. Or maybe I still own it, I’m not entirely sure.
Anyway, since throwing in the towel on this poker strategy site idea, other sites like CardRunners and StoxPoker have sprung up and gone on do really well (granted, on a much different business model than the one we had). Hmm… oops.
thewmarketplace.com
Back around 2005-2006 trading W$ and T$ was really popular on PokerStars. Basically if you won certain satellites you got paid in the form of W$ which could only be used to register for certain tournaments (I believe PokerStars still maintains this practice). Anyway, this idea was basically just to undercut market exchange websites, the largest of which was cashmanbrian.com. I figured charging like 1% less juice on the exchange than other sites did that I could seize a lot of market share. This wasn’t a well thought-out idea and construction on the site was never completed; this was probably for the best anyway, I think PokerStars has changed their policy on trading W$ such that a site like this wouldn’t have really gotten very far even if it did begin servicing customers.
europokerdb.com
Once on a flight back from Europe, which is how I get a lot of my decent ideas since I’m less distracted on a plane than I am otherwise, I got the idea to basically rip-off thepokerdb.com and create a site that lists tournament results for non-US facing sites that left the market when the UIGEA was passed. This was not nearly as good of an idea as I thought it was at the time. Not only would it have taken an immense amount of work, but it would have been really easy for thepokerdb to undercut all of that work by simply tracking tournaments at the sites they weren’t tracking at the time. The barrier to entry was just too low, non-existent really. I think the farthest I got on this idea was buying a couple of domains and picking a few people’s brains about the viability of the project before realizing it was probably too impractical.
sweatalert.com
I still maintain that this is a great idea if it could be implemented. Basically I noticed that anytime myself or one of my friends went deep in an online tournament, we’d have to open up an AIM window for each person we wished to alert of our progress. One night I got the idea to make the whole process automated. Rather than open up a new AIM window, send a new text or email, or start a new forum thread for each person you wished to notify of your progress in a tournament, you could simply post it to a website that dispatches the news to anyone who subscribes to your alerts.
This website actually came close to getting launched. You can still see it now online. The trouble was: we could never figure out how to integrate it with AIM. The idea was that someone could enter in information about the tournament they’re going deep in and click “submit”. Upon doing so, AIM messages would be sent out to all of their sweat subscribers. We could just never figure out how to bridge the gap between someone clicking submit on a form and AIM messages being dispatched as a result. I think Bluff Magazine has some type of “alert” system via thepokerdb to notify you when certain players go deep in online tournaments, so this idea was probably never really worth investing a whole lot in. Pretty good URL though, huh?
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