Bitcoin Forum

I have a Linux/OSX/Windows/IOS/Android client written in Monkey X with a parse-dot-com based back-end developed. I'm in the stage of planning a revenue model for it now but I'm not seeing how you really make money off of it. You can't really charge high-rates for deposit-fees without driving away a lot of users, and selling it through licensing saturates the market.

I actually made the deposit fee dynamic with a cap. It basically factors deposits since the beginning of the month by days to adjust the deposit fee and it changes in real-time..

I figured I need around 400 active users a month just to pay for hosting.. THE QUESTION: Is this why there aren't many people doing this?

I think the website like this it's hard to make money at the very begining. You need strong market skills, that's the key. I thinks it takes a long time to keep users grow and you have to provide a good game service, really dig into the game, not just create one.

Wouldn't you make money from the rake?  Or is it not that kind of poker app?

Earn from rake yeah.. withdrawal fees and maybe even ads if you're that desperate

+1 on the rake idea.  This is how Micon made his millions running Seals with Clubs.

Advertisements more likely than not going to drive away more traffic than the marginal revenue they generate imho.

I suggested is a desperate last resort sort of thing haha

Makes sense :)

Personally, if I where going to setup some sort of poker site I would try to keep btc withdrawal fee's at an absolute minimum.  The goal here is to try and drive as many people to your site to play as varied a set of tables as possible.  Since the site operator is literally taking a small rake off each table the goal is maximizing the # of hands played on the site.

Micon was smart in how he setup Seals with Clubs in that he didn't exclude the smaller players with excessive withdrawal fee's who where wanting to get their feet wet with bitcoin poker so to speak and actually offered up at least a single no-rake low stakes table to draw in said traffic.

Uhh, yeah, you implement a rake like most successful poker sites do. I question why you would code an entire Bitcoin poker app and back-end without actually having researched properly the revenue model for it and how previous Bitcoin poker sites have made a profit and been successful.

Because it only has texas-holdem currently that's how one person wrote and tested it for so many platforms inside a year in the evenings.

Rake and affiliate-revenue(ads) are out. I thought about the rake too when I was tempted to add blackjack early; I actually started but cut it out because I knew I had a long process already and wanted to test the market soon. Blackjack and holdem are the only two games I ever plan on implementing even though I could do even obscure one like spit in the ocean(an old favorite). If I ever get the capital to out-source I'll make a whole casino experience with BTC. I actually already have a German firm on hold for rapid development.

Texas holdem only is the reason the strategy is a challenge. Fees on payment gateways where BTC goes dynamically in to virtual "chips" was my best thought strategy but I know it'll take hundreds of users to make profit.

It costs next to nothing to host it though and Parse is one of the best scaling back-ends there is.

So haven't heard anything from you in awhile.  Did you end up implementing some kind of rake-back system?  Any idea when you might be coming online officially?

Taking off the pot or the winnings adds incalculable loss/expenses to users and a significant portion of the userbase would simply interpret it as worse odds.

As the owner and operator it appears to be the perfect revenue solution along with withdraw/deposit fees though.

You could probably get away with it where you have enough users to recover from user-drops. I'd suspect at least 30% of your users would stay in reaction; worse case.

You take a rake.  Its passive income.  Costs no more to run 100 virtual tables than to run 1. 

Im loking for something like this to start with poker room. We can cooperate, if ur interested, PM me

If I was a smart investor (and trust me I'm not saying I am), I'd probably not worry about taking the time to develop a bitcoin poker app and go with something like Cubeia's offering (http://www.cubeia.com/cubeia-poker/). I looked at them a while back and even with 50% margins on your rake it's going to be really hard to grab the market share you need to make your efforts worthwhile.

I see it almost as all or nothing. Seals with Clubs does not report earnings, but I recall seeing an article from Forbes regarding "projected" profits and they were around 20 million US annually (this was a few years ago). That's a nice chunk of change, but like I said it's a market share game. They have/had a number of pro poker players backing their system and regularly playing with their users and a lot of freerolls (back in the day). That builds a lot of loyalty.

There's nothing like brand loyalty, and it's going to be hard to get those kinds of avid players (IMO). Bottom line, I have a pretty extensive marketing background and could have just styled a poker client and had the app already built (using Cubeia) and walked away with 50% of the rake but it would have been an uphill battle to grab that market share. There are a lot of other online casinos offering BTC for chips as well nowadays.

I love hearing new ideas though  ;)

~Minty

Take a look through the biggest poker company around Pokerstars. They earn money on each table played you pay 10% to the house each sit en go, tournament. Cash table's are also a revenue for the house. I think if you stay bit lower then the 10% it's a good start.

As far as I know poker bots are not allowed in poker sites. How can you use that software  ???

Poker bots are useless. A perfect one would meter your hand which is bad unless you just try to bluff big pots with rare hands which you can still lose on the folds and most likely will.

Most attacks are from people trying to attack random number generators used for sorting decks and rolling dice. Also attacks on the server through the protocol for socket servers, and CGI and DB attacks for HTTP and AJAX based servers.

Other players cards aren't revealed even internally on most poker games even if you dump traffic from a client. Everyone at least knows what to hide and where to score things(not in the client and not one users hand in memory of another players client software).

Russians like to attack poker sites and clients it's always within the attacks in paragraph two. Those are the most advanced attacks leaving out phishing and social engineering. I think I heard of a buffer overflow attack on a poker client software years ago.. once

Dude you charge rake, there is no other way to play poker. No player will stand for a deposit or withdrawal fee. You are just turning people away from initial play right there.  Big sites only get away with that because of the huge overhead in VISA / MC and verification staff for verifying fraud payments.  

Rake is no biggie. No winning player cares about it especially on your scale and a $500k player isn't going to hit your site. Think of rake as ebay, you sell something and you pay a few bucks,you don't mind paying because you have a lot more coming in from the winning bidder, when i win a hand and fleece a table of players I don't mind paying $1 for rake.

Rake is also how you scale without investing. You can keep a few players going on pennies of bandwidth and when 1000's are playing it costs you more but rake x 1000 is as nice as well.

you charge something ridiculous like 0.05% .. if the site works you increase to 1% , when you have market share you go the full 5% .

Yeah rake does seem to make sense the more I hear from users. I'd still make it dynamic with a cap.

can you provide the link of you poker site , i am a poker player will try your site and recommend if their are some problems , if you want , and what all said is right by the way of rake you can earn , ya but it will take time to get profit, once the site get famous then you wont imagine that much amount you will earn.

yes a btc poker app could be a nice way to play poker and spread btc...
nice work! I am ready to "test" and play

I do want to mention one more thing. BTC poker is slim pickings. Recently someone well known in poker came up with a BTC site. It wasn't the best but it was nice enough for a v1.0 and it worked and took BTC and had the backing of a mid-range pro players name, and guess what 6 people showed up.  I haven't visited it lately but I think my craigslist ads get more hits.

If I was going to hit the BTC poker market today I would do it in one of two ways. Either host it from home or on a hack job to start so it costs nothing to run and can keep floating for years until it takes off - or option 2 make an interface so cutting edge that everyone wants to play it.

Bad business model you have developed.You should considered how to implement the revenue model before deploying the application. Advertisements is certainly not a good idea for poker sites.Most of the websites around earn by rake ,you should be doing that as well.

I seen it before I even started coding this. I just wanted something with passive revenue and had spare time. All black-hat SEO, mining, and service models that were the alternatives required too much capital or had markets like this but with higher overhead mostly in time since I can do all the work, but too much time. Like grinding out content and websites for niche marketing, putting S7 miners on free electricity when pools are petahash rates, a secure tumbler on a dedicated host(expensive) etc..

I even looked for some overseen edge with low-level blockchain stuff to exploit in mining..

The server I wrote is on a x86 thin-client behind my NAT barely taking up any KWH. I have a parse.com server too if it gets too heavy and the database is portable. I didn't pay with anything but time so far. I wrote most of it in evenings inside a month.

If it doesn't work out I'll turn it in to a intranet kiosk solution and sale licenses..


I wanted a poker client either way. If BTC fails I license a kiosk intranet solution or as a WAN solution for a few grand a license. Whatever under-cuts the other 1-2 people already doing it.