A brief gap between posts, as I return from a short summer break and some time with family. I’ve long been an advocate of the mantra of “life-work” (not work-life) balance, so making sure to still have some fun with the kids while launching a startup!

To Be Fundamentally Better

An ex-colleague asked me recently “what is 4Poker?” as another friend of mine said “what can poker players expect?”

As a startup with an investor pitch deck that is 17 pages long, the questions are too meaty for one blog post, but I thought in the interest of expectations setting, this week I would tackle the topic of innovation.

4Poker is slightly different in its positioning to a modern day startup, as we are much more of a “throwback” to some of the values and principles that were foundational to the game and industry, so timeless in nature, that they deserve to still have their place.

In itself a new poker offering is perhaps not the attractive or exciting a proposition on face value as a web3 AI-driven eSports NFT collectible game, but innovation and the creation of something new, can also take on the form of being an improvement on previous. Sustainable innovation in the form of mastering the basics.

In the case of 4Poker, much of what we stand for is in re-creation and re-imagination, rather than invention. The game needs no reinvention. Poker was online in every country around the world several years before the US had daily fantasy, or Asia had eSports, or many other countries had legalised online sports betting, let alone casino.

Very much a noughties product, the online poker boom started around 2003, but was still exploding beyond 2011, as many new and emerging markets and major territories moved to a regulated licensed model for poker.

As I reflect on that period, some of the coolest things for poker were coming from the likes of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, if you think of the stable of WSOP champions Stars had leading the site with an unrivalled SuperNova loyalty scheme and aspirational Live Events calendar, just as Full Tilt launched their red and black pros, while running the Iron Man Challenge.

Beyond loyalty and ambassador programmes, true invention came in the form of Rush, which arrived on Full Tilt around 2011, a fast-fold variant later becoming a mobile standard offering, but otherwise innovation was few and far between, and many attempts to create something completely new fell flat. Winamax’s Expresso came later and changed the game a little more to introduce some gaming mechanics and jackpots, but generally speaking the industry has been quite static. In more recent years GGPoker has set about to create a really vibrant environment that is far more feature rich and focused on fun, luck and gaming, and are succeeding.

4Poker’s launch offering will be exposed to players at the end of this year, and I expect players to refer to it as “classic” or maybe even “familiar”. There is no secret it is made to suit skilled and serious poker, and support competitive poker tournament series’. In a way there are no bells and whistles at all, but instead a core poker product that is robust and technically ready for the scalability required to support an intense roadmap for growth.

Planned innovation within 4Poker though will not be a collection of easily imitated, gimmicky features, nor an attempt to revolutionize game types.

The thing that often gets lost in this market while focusing on the “shiny new”, is the things that matter most. Product and development efficiency, platform scalability, seamless on-boarding or frictionless documentation processes, predictive capabilities and a data-driven ecosystem, or true relevance in personalization, segmentation and localization, not just translation.

None of these are very sexy but are vital to overall product hygiene, and I can guarantee you that all of them struggle to get priority for enhancement, with any mature operator.

If you sit down at 4Poker and are missing your emojis, let us know. If there are some settings that are lacking, we’ll expect that feedback too. If our players down the line want to have their luck-based gaming offering available, we’ll be open-minded and responsive, but the starting point will be one that returns to being foundational. A lobby consistent with expectations and gameplay that stands to win at being best-and-fairest, with transparent and low rake a priority. On top of that will be a commercial team that is laser focused on appropriately and fairly rewarding loyalty, not loss.

Our ambition is to be fundamentally better. The best bits of the years gone by, growing over time with feature sets that matter the most to the players. The player once paying their way through college or multi-tabling a living in 2009 may yet have a home once again, because skill and winners will not only be welcome, but respected and rewarded.