When I joined 4Poker one of the trade media outlets I trust, subsequently conducted an interview and in that interview one of the things I recall saying was “poker players will genuinely have a seat at our table”. I wanted to unpack that a little and give players an indication of HOW we can bring to life this levelling up of the community aspect of poker.

Let’s first explore what is happening (and not happening) today in the space. Such is the case in many facets of our industry where we remain immature, or not best-in-class, online gaming and poker runs second to much of the rest of online when it comes to community.

Take a look at the crypto and NFT space for example, and the entire concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). It has grown legs since the start of blockchain technology and today communities and projects promote their DAO and execute in a way ranging from voting and decision making up to partial or shared ownership. Such is the case of decentralization, the entire premise is one of bottoms-up governance and the democratic majority, if not consensus.

Compare that to gaming or poker, whereby a discord channel with a little bit of management presence or a twitch stream led by a paid ambassador, is about the extent of community. Twitter offers some like-minded connectivity and engagement, but frankly encourages more toxicity than it does productivity in terms of giving a voice.

So how do we take on more of the principles of true player governance as seen with some of the aspects of a DAO, even though we are not and will never be decentralized? I think much of our opportunity comes through transparency, availability and just as we do with the poker game, tournaments and product itself, “facilitating” a positive environment in which people want to spend time in, with others.

Instead of just opening a discord channel, we have decided to create our own forum. From Day 1 this will give us integration to our internal knowledge bases and systems - such as JIRA and Confluence - and will later enable us to more easily enhance the community offering over time, with some gamification and other features. It will be a community that will inevitably grow over time, and just as a DAO offers ownership elements, we have at the top of our community a lot of seed investors in the business, operating practically as a professional advisory group. Beyond them will be our future investors… the players. Not just investors of rake and fees. Investors of time. Investors of knowledge.

We will of course have some of the more traditional and expected monetary rewards for loyalty, through rakeback, but more unconventional is the non-monetary value of community and our intent to make some future decisions “with” our players. We see this as merely us living out our tagline promise of being “poker for players, by players”.

We also state in our brand manifesto that “if it’s good for poker, we’ll do it”, and why wouldn’t this be?

This site, and our home of poker only grows and prospers if the people within it, want to be there. It feels so elementary, yet giving said players a voice should be reassuring to the game’s future. For a long time operators have been choosing the next revenue generating project ahead in priority of some basic product hygiene needs, and wants. Why fix a friction-filled on-boarding journey for your existing player base when you can launch something cool and new, OR add more people to that same underwhelming and underperforming user journey, via a new small license launch!

Sarcastic views aside… will this work?

There’s no doubt there needs to be some pragmatism, because we are a startup with a lot of fundamental basics still to develop and deliver, but by being open and transparent, we would like to think that the future of our roadmap and development pipeline, is a healthy mix between core development, optimization and innovation.

Across each of these, is the ability to positively impact - whether that is through a player vote on our next key delivery, or players helping raise bugs for fixing, or by giving the forum a platform for knowledge sharing and a say towards future innovation and best practices.

It’s a small step towards growing a productive community, that not only helps each other, but helps us in management, to help the game.

On the topic of small steps to take in community, one thing we are also keen to do as a management team is re-establish some of the old principles and values around local community.

We have a small leadership team in the Isle of Man, and we will endeavour over time to give back to our Island and other places we work and live, so again – we can grow together.

For those few who are Isle of Man based poker enthusiasts, you will be able to meet the 4Poker team in 2 weeks time, on Friday September 16, as we momentarily take over one of the local Friday night casino events, to offer a RAKE FREE tourney with the chance to knock out a pro or 2, as we give away some seats to your local MANX CUP event in October, along with some staff bounties to recover your buy-in, and all with a dinner on us.

Very much look forward to reconnecting with the game and its players – one community at a time.