DoylesRoom

» see doylesroom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DoylesRoom was United States-only at the legal layer, which is an odd thing to say about a business run through a Cypriot company and a Canadian one. Its players were American, its money moved through American banks, and the thing that eventually killed it was a federal indictment in Baltimore. Real-money online poker is a category I have watched entirely from outside, since in Turkey the sites sit behind a network block and the closest most people came to any of it was the World Series of Poker on late-night television.

It opened in 2004 on the Tribeca Tables network under the name of Doyle Brunson, who by then had been winning at cards for four decades and was as near as the game had to a public face. The site was his the way a brand is somebody's. Mike Caro played on it, and so did his son Todd Brunson.

On 15 April 2011 the Justice Department seized PokerStars and Full Tilt and the rest of the big rooms, and that date is still called Black Friday by everyone in the business. DoylesRoom was not in the April set. It went five weeks later, on indictments unsealed in Baltimore in late May 2011 against a Canadian company and a Cypriot one, with doylesroom.com taken by court order alongside nine other gambling domains. Brunson took his name off it. On 1 November 2011 the accounts and the balances moved to Americas Cardroom, and DoylesRoom stopped existing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ four networks in seven years ~

The middle of this story is a business being evicted repeatedly for the crime of who its customers were. Tribeca stopped taking American players, so DoylesRoom moved to Microgaming in 2007. Microgaming stopped taking American players, so it moved to the Cake network in January 2009. In January 2011 it moved once more, onto Yatahay.

Four networks in seven years is not a strategy and nobody at the time pretended it was. Each move meant a new software client, a new set of tables and a fresh migration of every account balance, which is a brutal thing to put a player base through even once. The rooms that survived the era were the ones that gave up the American market early and took the revenue hit. DoylesRoom kept choosing the customers over the stability, right up to the point where a court removed the choice.

~ the ten domains ~

The seizure was not aimed at DoylesRoom specifically. A federal grand jury in Maryland returned indictments on 26 April 2011 and they were unsealed the following month, charging two businesses and three individuals with running an illegal gambling operation and with money laundering. Eleven bank accounts went, scattered across North Carolina and Guam and Panama and Malta. Ten domains went with them, and doylesroom.com was one entry on that list, sitting next to Bookmaker.com and TruePoker.com.

That is a specific way to die. Nobody made a decision about DoylesRoom, nobody read a shutdown memo, and there was no announcement written by anyone who had ever worked there. A court signed an order about a category, the domain resolved to a seizure notice, and a room where people had been playing that morning was simply not reachable that afternoon.

~ the offer he turned down ~

Brunson has told the story more than once and the number moves slightly between tellings, somewhere around 230 to 235 million dollars for the site, offered shortly before the April seizures. He said no. His stated reasoning was that online poker was still climbing and the thing would soon be worth double.

Weeks later the American market was closed by indictment and the asset was worth nothing at all. It is a clean illustration of a risk that does not appear on any spreadsheet: the business was not overvalued and the growth projection was not wrong on its own terms. The entire valuation rested on a legal question that nobody involved thought was going to be answered that year, and when it was answered the number went to zero without passing through any of the values in between.

~ what the name was worth ~

A licensed-name poker room is a straightforward trade. The operator gets trust it has not earned, the player gets a reason to prefer this room over the identical one next door, and the name gets paid. It works until the room does something the name cannot afford to be attached to, at which point the whole arrangement unwinds in a single press release.

What replaced it says the rest. The Winning Poker Network did not build a new brand for the players it inherited. It reached back and revived Americas Cardroom, a name that had been sitting unused since 2007, and pointed the accounts at it on 1 November 2011. After Black Friday a poker room wanted a name that belonged to nobody in particular, because a name that belongs to somebody is a name that can be taken away.

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