How to build the best cardroom?

[Ms 45]

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What do you look for in a card room? What are the most important factors that you consider when choosing where to play?

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Without question the most important factor for serious players in determining if/where they will play is how much money they are likely to make in a given game. We will put up with a lot (incompetent dealers, clouds of smoke, obnoxious players) as long as the game is soft enough.

Make no mistake about it, for your cardroom to be a success you need a core of serious, skilled players to keep the games going and reasonably full. However, you won’t get these skilled players without a steady supply of “fish” making the games soft enough to be appealing to your regulars. In my opinion, Party Poker has shown that the way to bring in the unskilled fish is through mainstream marketing (not niche marketing in poker magazines, websites, etc.).

I think that the success of Party Poker provides a model for other poker rooms, both live and online, to follow. Party heavily markets their product through mainstream sources, which instigates literally tens of thousands of unskilled players to play at Party Poker every day. The effect of the marketing does not stop there; thousands of skilled players also play at Party Poker every day because of the large numbers of fish playing at the tables. Notice that Party Poker is almost as large as every other online poker site combined. Also notice that, aside from being aesthetically ugly, Party Poker has the worst rake structure, the worst software, and the worst customer service of all the major online poker sites. Party has realized that the key to building a successful poker operation lies in the marketing, and everything else is of secondary concern. (You can go to www.pokerpulse.com to see for yourself the number of players Party Poker routinely draws in).

Party Poker’s business model can easily be applied to B&M cardrooms. I hope that if you do decide to build your poker room, you follow this model and devote most of your attention to marketing. Sure, it would be nice if you had excellent dealers and a great comp program, but as long as your facility is reasonably clean, competent, and convenient your regular customers will be more than willing to overlook your cardroom's shortcomings.