SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic--(INFORMATION WEEK)--July 8,
2002--
The game of poker was popularized in the mid-19th century along
the rivers, railroads, and wagon trails of the sprawling United
States, according to Andy Bellin, author of the recently published
Poker Nation (HarperCollins, 2002). The latest twist on that history:
poker on the sprawling Internet.
One of the most recent entrants is PartyPoker.com.
The multiplayer site, launched last year, features live, real-time
poker games such as Omaha, Seven-Card Stud, and Texas Hold 'Em.
Jupiter Media Metrix ranked PartyPoker the
fastest-growing multiplayer poker site in the United States
for the first quarter of this year, when site traffic rocketed
from 245,000 unique visitors in January to 746,000 in March.
"There's a big difference between PartyPoker and other gambling
sites," says Christopher Todd, director of marketing at PartyPoker
and a former analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. And that's because
there's a big difference between poker and other casino games.
"With most gambling sites, users come in and bet against the
house," Todd says. "Our model is different--users play
against each other." PartyPoker takes a small fee, called
the rake, of each pot that's won, usually a small percentage,
"a little less than 3% on average," he says.
That same betting structure, with its relatively low profit potential,
is the reason the big casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City limit
the number of poker tables they operate, as Bellin points out
in his book. It also may be PartyPoker's ace-in-the-hole when
it comes to the odds of being prosecuted by federal authorities.
"We saw poker as a very accepted form of gambling," Todd
says.
PartyPoker is licensed and regulated
by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in Quebec. The site runs on
20 servers--a couple of Sun Microsystems enterprise computers,
but mostly Dell machines--located in a Montreal facility that's
operated by an Internet service provider called Mohawk Internet
Technologies. "We constantly upgrade our servers. They're state-of-the-art
machines," boasts PartyPoker CEO Vikrant Bhargava.
But the pride and joy of Bhargava and Todd is the software they
had custom-developed in India two years ago. "We hadn't done
a multiplayer game site before this," says Bhargava, an engineer
by training who used to work at Bank of America. The client software
has been downloaded by 65,000 potential
players since the site's launch last August, and the
back-end software has supported as many as 1,100
simultaneous players.
"A proper multiplayer platform has to have ability to manage
a large number of players, playing, chatting, transferring funds
from table to table," Bhargava says. "Each move is dependent
on other moves." The two basic ingredients are speed and volume.
"We're still trying to increase the speed," he admits.
PartyPoker exploits one of the
Internet's most intrinsic attributes: immediacy.
"When you look historically at other successful online models--travel
sites, music file-sharing sites--they created a sense of convenience
or utility," Todd says. "Today, people are forced to go
to Indian reservations or Atlantic City or Las Vegas to gamble.
Now, you can sit in your living room in your underwear and watch
Sports Center and play poker online. That's a huge element of
convenience."
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