Developing A New Poker Site - Feedback

How's it going everyone? This is my first post on CC and I'm hoping I can get a lot of feedback from the community about a new poker site a buddy and me are looking to create over the next year. This post is kinda lengthy but we're really excited and we want to start coding ASAP.

Long story short, we both finished some large projects late last month and we'll have some free time to finally pursue this and we want to start with listening to the community/end user and developing from there.

We know that we're going to need the basic game structures for cash, sit/spin 'n' go, MTT's, etc., but where we want to stand out is the user experience overall. Here's some ideas we had.

1. No Rake - Our platform will run in the cloud. Since cloud pricing is based on the amount of resources/data being used, we thought about charging a reasonable hourly rate per table a player was at. For example - if a player is playing cash at a .50c/$1.00 table, we thought an hourly fee of $2.00 would be deducted from their stack. If they were playing 2 tables, then $4.00 ($2.00 from each stack at each table). Some could argue that this would eat a players profits with the whole 5bb/100 hands winning theory but has anyone ever calculated the total rake pulled from their won pots in an hour? There obviously wouldn't be any rake back but we thought about issuing monthly incentives back.
2. All Web App - Everything will be done in the browser. No application to download and install.
3. Hand Insurance - I live in Houston and a lot of the live card rooms here offer insurance. Shout out to any H-Town players btw! If you're not familiar with the concept, it sounds exactly like what it entails. Depending on the number of outs your opponent has, you can pay a premium to protect your potential winnings. For example - if you had AA and your opponent made a pair of kings on the turn with KQ and there was $400 total in the pot. They have 5 outs so that's like 8 to 1. So for every $8 in the pot, you would pay $1 in insurance. So for $50, you could lock up $350 of the pot. If your opponent hits two pair or trips, the house would credit you $350. If you won, the house would just take the premium. I liked this idea because I feel like a lot of micro-stakes players would jump all over this. It seems like a common thread is dealing with suck outs & bad beats in the micros.
4. Prop Bets - I thought it would be such a cool idea if we could build in prop bets to our system like the deuce seven game, red and black, pick-a-card, straddles, splash/bomb pots, high-hand bonus and round of omaha (ROO). I don't know if people are familiar with ROO (or if i'm even abbreviating it right) but there's two buttons on the table. Your normal dealer button and a button with the word 'Omaha' on it. Both are moving in opposite directions and whenever they meet, a round of Omaha is played. This is a fun thing to put into your live game if you haven't already. There's always a lot of action.
5. Player Transfers/Backing - I want players to be able to freely transfer funds to each other whenever they want. I also want to build in some type of escrow service for contracts between players. Let's say you decide to back a player for a tournament and in return they'll give you 30% of their winnings. I want simple/straight-forward contracts that both users agree too and from there I want our site/system to automatically withdrawal the funds from the backers account, purchase the ticket and if the player places/wins, I want the funds disbursed accordingly. There would obviously be cancellation deadlines, etc to account for.
6. Our Own HUD - We're not going out of our way in any shape or form to modify our site to increase compatibility for other company's HUD's. The reason why is because we're going to build our own HUD. A top of the line, full service, user defined and customized HUD that works for our site. It's going to have all the bells and whistles other HUDS have. It's going to be able to update live without any exporting or uploading hand histories, etc. It will work out of the box for beginners and have all the custom features a pro will need. We've already purchased a few of them to start looking at the features/options to make sure we're not missing anything. If you don't want it, you can simply remove the feature.
7. One Day Turnaround Cashouts - It's 2019. I've worked for some very large financial servicing companies developing programs that track thousands upon thousands of transactions a minute. I do not understand for the life of me how some sites can withdrawal money from an account instantly but can not process a withdrawal for multiple days on end in today's tech industry. If you request a withdrawal before 4 PM, I want to be able to say we sent your wire transfer to your bank the next business day. There's a few private merchant processing companies we've talked to about this and they seem to be on board with how we plan on doing this.
8. Poker Bots - Yes - you will be able to use poker bots on our site but you will only use them in designated rooms/tables against other poker bots. I encourage programming and developing and I think it is amazing seeing AI flourish the way it has. I think that this will definitely be unique to our site and a great opportunity for developers without being in fear of losing their roll like on other sites. With that being said, if we catch you using a bot against real players...we will immediately cease the funds in your account and reimburse the players your bot beat. We will even pay out of our own pocket to reimburse a real player who lost to a bot if the funds from the bot's owner is no longer available. I can not stress this enough. Do not be the selfish jerk who ruins a good opportunity for people who are following the rules.
9. Legality/Player Funds - We're pretty confident that we can operate this site without any legal ramifications if we follow certain guidelines and requirements we've been advised about. At any given time players will be able see the total amount of player funds on the site, the total amount the site has made and the total amount that's gone into operating cost/cloud hosting.
10. Name - We don't have the slightest clue what we want to name it lol We thought about giving away a free $200 bucks to anyone who could help us come up with the best name and logo idea. What do you think? We'll probably post a separate thread if people like that idea.

Well that's our ideas! I know that was kind of lengthy but I really wanted to paint a picture for the type of environment we want to create. I know we're shooting for the moon but all we have is time. Our goal is to get the site up within 1 years time. So maybe around April of 2020. Maybe that seems unrealistic but we're both pretty damn good at what we do. We might be donks at a $1/$2 online game but can definitely hold our own in the development world.

Please guys feel free to comment, offer suggestions, and feedback! We really want a site that's dedicated to the players.

Thanks,
-Nate

Have you reached out to the Phil Galfond led runitonce poker site creators? Their goals are similar and they may be willing to share ideas and knowledge with you.

Good luck

I have to many good ideas to list . private message me and I would be happy to share . Don't want to flood the chat with random ideas . Best of wishes on your project. Really hope you can make a zero rake client.

Sorry to say I wouldn't be keen. My main reason being I want to use one hud over all sites I play on. My hud is set up exactly how I want it and layout is obviously exactly the same wherever I play. Also I know the software well and can easily achieve whatever i want with it. I don't want to have to try replicate my hud on another program or learn how to analyse on it either. Not sure I'm comfortable with the bot rooms, giving people somewhere to test there bots doesn't sit right with me. And surely your hourly table charge is rake by another name just more unfair. If I've won $100 in an hour I pay $2 great but what about the player who's won $2 in an hour they've paid 100% compared to the others 2%. No one likes high rake however rake works because everyone pays the same percentage on their winnings.

5pAce_C0wb0y said:

Sorry to say I wouldn't be keen. My main reason being I want to use one hud over all sites I play on. My hud is set up exactly how I want it and layout is obviously exactly the same wherever I play. Also I know the software well and can easily achieve whatever i want with it. I don't want to have to try replicate my hud on another program or learn how to analyse on it either. Not sure I'm comfortable with the bot rooms, giving people somewhere to test there bots doesn't sit right with me. And surely your hourly table charge is rake by another name just more unfair. If I've won $100 in an hour I pay $2 great but what about the player who's won $2 in an hour they've paid 100% compared to the others 2%. No one likes high rake however rake works because everyone pays the same percentage on their winnings.

Click to expand...

The rake structure (or not-rake) is the same as most live casino in games over 2/5. In most 5/10 games you’ll pay $7 per half hour as opposed to paying a percentage of each pit which can get really expensive. It’s a preferred rake alternative for higher stakes.

I dislike huds ....


I think option 8 is interesting. I myself don't use bots but I think its a great idea to allow them on clearly marked BOT tables. I think that idea could be a successful niche and could be a factor in the success of a new poker site.

I wish you the best with the site.

NoLimitCoin poker has no rake

and has wsop satellites going non stop. Also has free rolls all day for cash and the Main Event.