UltimatePoker.com

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

~ the last words ~

Ultimate Poker was region-locked at the legal layer, which is a rarer thing than being region-locked by language or by shipping cost. The check was not whether you spoke english. It was whether your device could prove you were physically standing inside the state of Nevada at the moment you sat down at the table.

Turkey was moving the opposite direction over exactly those years. The posture here on online betting was blocked domains rather than licensed operators, so the american argument about how to bring a gray market inside the law never had a local version to follow. From here the whole episode reads as a regulatory experiment somebody else ran.

The experiment itself is worth the grave. Online poker in the united states had been an enormous unregulated business until april 2011, when the federal indictments known as Black Friday took the offshore sites off american screens overnight. Nevada answered by writing rules for the thing rather than by trying to delete it, and Ultimate Gaming was first through the door.

It lasted nineteen months. The company that had built the only legal poker room in the country closed it because not enough people came.

~ the record ~

~ the first hand ~

The site went live at 9 a.m. Pacific on 30 april 2013, opening with a thirty-day trial period so the Nevada Gaming Control Board could watch whether the age and location verification actually held. Ultimate Gaming was a Station Casinos subsidiary out of Summerlin, and getting there first was the entire strategy. The company had spent its money on the license and on a geolocation stack strict enough to satisfy a regulator watching in real time.

New Jersey followed later that year and Ultimate went in there too, partnered with the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. For a stretch in 2013 the phrase legal online poker in america meant this one company, which is a position a lot of businesses would trade a great deal for.

~ what went wrong ~

Being first turned out to be worth less than being good. The software was widely described by players as behind what they had been using offshore for a decade, and poker is a category where the regulars notice immediately. Worse than the software was the arithmetic of a walled market: a poker room needs a crowd, and the crowd was capped at the population of one state.

The traffic numbers near the end are the whole story. Ultimate was averaging around sixty cash-game players while Bovada, licensed by nobody and reachable by anyone, was averaging around fourteen hundred. In New Jersey the site never held more than three percent of the online poker market. Legality was supposed to be the advantage and it turned out that players had already made their peace with not having it.

~ what it proved ~

New Jersey ended first. On 19 september 2014 Ultimate Gaming announced it was terminating its agreement with the Trump Taj Mahal, citing breaches by the casino's owner and one and a half million dollars it said it was owed after the operator filed for bankruptcy protection. Nevada was shut down on 14 november with revenues that had never come close to projections.

What the run demonstrated was uncomfortable for everyone who had argued that regulation would fix the market. Legalizing gambling state by state produces player pools too small to hold a game together, and the unlicensed competitor is one browser tab away the entire time. American online poker only started working again as states signed compacts to share their pools, which took years. Ultimate Poker was the one that proved it by dying of it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »