Topic: Starting a new gambling site through investors. Poker by Dabs - page 2. (Read 3901 times)

Poker is hard imo. If you get beyond anything but small you have to deal with collusion issues, bots, ratholers, and short stackers. Go provably fair baccarat highest limits possible. Very popular game with the highest limit gamblers in Asia and getting a foothold into Las Vegas. Maccau, China's Vegas, makes 2/3rds of its ENTIRE revenue from the VIPs who play this game, which is astonishing because it's a 1% house edge.

Just this one for now. I'm already doing escrows and a lotto. Both have been relatively successful.

Only the online poker really needs a site or client/server to take off.

How many ventures are you trying to start again? None of them will be successful.

I'd just like to add that PokerStars has the lowest rake for non-bitcoin poker card rooms at 4.5%. All others are charging 1 cent or something per hand, with a $3 or $4 maximum cap.

Physical brick and mortar casinos or card rooms charge 5% to 10% rake.

As for bitcoin only poker rooms, my initial research shows 5% as the highest. And 2.5% as the lowest with certain games going as low as 1%. They also have maximums, such as 0.01 BTC. These sites also have promotions such as freerolls and rakeback. No Flop No Drop means no rake for that particular hand.

Generally:
Higher rake is better for investors.
Lower rake is better for players.

We need to find a balance as well as include promotions and marketing to attract enough players to make this profitable.

My current system already asks players to voluntarily "cut the deck", so the game will be fair. As the operator, it is in my best interests to keep the game as fair as possible, so there will be no "god mode" and we will use some sort of collusion detection system as well as manual review of hands.

The games can be made 100% provably fair by revealing the deck either after the hand, or after a day or two, but I'm not sure poker players will want that, therefore I came up with a system that attempts to do this without revealing all the cards except what players can normally see. If you fold and muck your cards, no one else should be able to see them.

That's what I do for the shuffling part. The dealing part is secret so no one else sees the cards.

Your problem, is the same problem that is on all other poker sites, which is, how to prevent super-users or god-mode players. This is where trust and reputation come in. I have no need to play my own game. All dice site owners can play their own games, and that is not good for other investors as the owner can obviously win.

The proof here, so far, is that each card has a secret only for that card. And while you know the hash ahead of time, you don't know the card rank and suit until I give you the secret for it.

That rake is pretty standard across all poker sites that I have seen, and it is much lower than physical casino card rooms. I could do lower or higher, depending on any number of other factors. No flop, no drop, and maybe some other arbitrary rules.

I thought about that idea for a poker site, it wouldn't be that difficult to implement.  You just have everyone contribute some random data, hash it all together, and use that as the seed for a PRING.  

One problem, though is that you'd need a way to prove that no one knows who anyone else's cards are.

Also 2-5% rake is a huge ripoff.

My napkin math is 6 to 10 players per table * 20 to 30 tables * 60 hands per hour * 24 hours * 25 days per month * 2% to 5% rake. All ring or cash games. That's at least 50 BTC to 100 BTC or more per month, after about 6 months to 1 year. Tournaments are not yet included, and there's no zoom or rush or fast fold style games yet.

Tell me if I'm wrong, too optimistic or overestimating the numbers. I feel that is conservative.

Some popular bitcoin poker websites: 300 players average, 30 tables average.
Some non-bitcoin poker sites: 50,000 players, 2000 tournaments.

Feel free to send me a PM. If there's interest, I'll do a self-managed IPO and issue 10000 shares worth 0.1 each with a minimum of 10 shares or 1 BTC. I'm not really interested in trading for this as that's a secondary market already and I'll leave it to the more savvy ones to do PTs if they want.

If not, well, it was worth a try, and I'll probably open source the whole thing just to get it out there.

*edit*

Hi,

Please see this thread for reference:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/need-30-to-60-btc-to-start-up-yet-another-gambling-site-280368

Summary:
1. I want to put up my own Poker website with client / server, and / or HTML5.
2. I will need funding to pay developers and promotions.
3. I will run it. Cold wallet will be controlled by me.
4. I will pay all investors according to their proportional contribution from profits.

I started a thread on the lending forum, didn't get much interest there, locked it, and starting this here.

Instead of making an IPO or whatever, I just wanted to summarize first my intentions and gauge interest.

In any case, whether or not this attracts investors, I will still attempt to do it on my own.

As far as investing is concerned, all investors will be individually tracked manually, so I do not want more than 100 different investors. You can be anonymous (being referred to only by a bitcoin address) or you can post or PM me (and remain anonymous to the rest).

I will ideally want a total of up to 1000 BTC to start this project with minimum individual investors starting at 1 BTC. So I will get maybe 100 investors who buy shares of my poker company at 10 BTC each, for example. Or I get 10 investors who buy 100 BTC each.

All expenses and expenditures will be listed.

What will differentiate my poker site from all the others out there? I will attempt to use a so called "Provably Fair" system. In all other non-poker gambling or casino sites, such as the popular dice sites, Provably Fair allows players to verify that they got a fair dice roll. That they won or lost fairly.

In truth, the current implementation of Provably Fair gaming systems are actually "Probably Fair" with the probability that they are fair as an astronomical probability. Specifically 1 or 2 in 2^256 to 2^512. We're talking about cryptographically secure hash collision resistance.

The following threads are some discussions I have started or participated in about this from a technical point of view.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/proof-of-knowledge-without-trusting-282726  and
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266791.40

And this is an actual game I am hosting now (although the players are taking their sweet time.)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/provably-fair-online-poker-by-dabs-beta-test-1-274068

The largest poker sites are non-bitcoin, yet they can not "prove" their hands are fair except through third party accreditation from gambling commissions or independent audits. The players just have to trust them.

Statistical analysis of millions of hands show uniformity and indirectly the fairness.

Poker is also a PvP game. Player versus Player. The players never play against the house. The house always takes a rake or a profit, unlike dice sites where you bet against the site. Thus, SD having some losing months.

At this point, I have not asked for anything other than opinions or feedback. I don't know whether to do this directly or go through a stock exchange (and issue dividends.) I do know, if I do this directly, you can email, PM and/or message me and I can keep track of at most 100 people, which is all I need.

If I do not reach the required minimum amount, I simply refund all investors back whatever they sent. If I get only half or a third, I will see if I can still make the project work.

This is not a loan, this is an investment. Investments, while I will attempt and exhaust all possible means to make this profitable, are like gambling; this can still lose or ROI will take a little bit longer than all these other mining companies accepting pre-orders.


Dabs