The reinvention of poker?

Poker is dying, eSports is booming. That’€™s the commonly held wisdom in the egaming industry and it’s not without basis. The eSports industry is set to grow 43% to $463m in 2016, while the poker industry is perhaps best represented by PokerStars which has reported a decline in the vertical in every quarter this year.

Of course many in the poker industry are aware of these diverging paths and doing their best to tap into the burgeoning video games sector. The aforementioned PokerStars is perhaps the best example, with its recent sponsorship of pro eSports outfit Team Liquid, which sees members of the team livestream online poker to their Twitch fans. PokerStars’ own Twitch channel is rapidly growing, with almost four million views to date, the majority of which come from the 18-34 demographic which poker is desperate to tap into.

Elsewhere the Global Poker League is targeting a very similar audience with its pro teams, live streaming and live tournaments much like major eSport competitions. However even that effort sees the core poker product essentially unchanged from the game played in Wild West saloons.

Kim Lund, the CEO of Swedish developer Aftermath Interactive, believes the old game needs an injection of new life with the incorporation of several ideas lifted from video games. The result is Hands of Victory, created by Lund and his team of poker lifers, many of whom were with Pokeroom back when UIGEA hit.

Hands of Victory is arguably the most gamified version of poker ever seen. The core rules of Texas hold ‘em apply but with a whole litany of tweaks to speed up gameplay, introduce more narrative and deepen the impact of skill.

Players start by choosing a character with special powers – the ability to replace a hole card for example – and are then thrown into a four man sit-and-go. There is no real-life wagering, rather players can level up by collecting virtual currency much like social poker. On the grander scale, the best eight players each month are chosen to play in a tournament, with potential prize money on the line, and ideally live-streamed to thousands of viewers.

Below, Lund explains why the free-to-play game could be perfect for hard-core grinders who are being marginalized by real-money operators and why the US is his target market.

EGR North America (EGR NA): How did you come up with the idea?

Kim Lund (KL): I had been playing with the idea of merging eSports and poker for quite a while, but it wasn’t really until Twitch decided to allow poker streaming that it was even possible to have that conversation. Combining the two simply wasn’t on the radar for egaming people before that.

However after people started broadcasting poker on Twitch, the natural convergence started to happen, which is when we thought it was the time to give this thing a go. Me and others from Pokeroom came together and by spring 2016 we had a proof of concept platform developed. We put some money into it and spent six months taking it to where we are now, which is in the middle of our first private funding round.

EGR NA: What kind of competition is there for you in this space?

KL: The difference between us and everyone else that’s seen this opportunity is that others are trying to fit eSports into the gambling industry – for example by offering betting markets on eSports. But I come at it the other way. I want to find a way to bring casino and gambling games like poker into the eSports world.

EGR NA: How are you going to make your version of poker more fun to watch live or on streams than the traditional product?

KL: Twitch isn’t necessarily built for poker. In eSports someone will be playing the game and commentating on their actions. But poker is so much more strategic and all of that is internalised within the player. There is nothing in what the player does – check, call, raise or fold – that tells you really what he is thinking.

The solution is to ask what eSports has that poker doesn’t, and how we can make poker function more like those games without cutting its balls off. It needs to retain its core qualities but we needed to add some things to make it more exciting to watch live.

That’s why we gave individual characters different skills like the ability to see an opponent’s hole card, or extra time which adds a level of strategy. We also made the tournaments shorter by adding shrinking stacks and dealing three cards, with one to be discarded which leads to better hands.

There also needed to be more skill involved in the short term. Poker is of course a skill game but that’s something which has to be proved over time and it wasn’t necessarily present in a 20 minute sit-and-go. To do that we made players draw their cards from a personal deck that isn’t shuffled, so there’s an emphasis on card reading and memory in there.

We also give skill points for good tactics and strategy. If you win a hand because you get lucky and hit a straight on the river you’ll get points, but you’ll score more highly if you play a hand well, draw people into the pot and maximize your winnings.

EGR NA: How are you planning to monetize this if you are staying away from the pay-to-win model normally favored in social poker concepts?

KL: Firstly, that model is not consistent with our focus on skill and on the eventual inclusion of prize money in tournaments.

We have two primary game modes – a free one where you play to win in-game currency and another where you pay to gain experience points to help you level up and unlock new things. You have to pay for access to that mode and you have a certain amount of lives to get to the next level – i.e. if you don’t earn a hundred points in five tournaments then you’ll have to buy more lives.

We think that replicates the pressure of real-money and not wanting to lose.

EGR NA: It sounds like the session time for the game is going to be longer than traditional social poker which is mostly aimed at people who have a few minutes to spare on the train. Is this going to be an issue?

KL: It’s going to be longer game times than traditional social poker – but we are not targeting the social poker demographic. We are targeting more hard-core poker players and competitive gamers. We’re comparing session times to a League of Legends match.

Our games still have an average time of 20 minutes so it’s still quicker than a normal sit-and-go because we speed up the game but this is not a two-minute pass-the-time game. We see this as being more competitive so it’s different to what social poker and even real-money poker is trying to do these days with the recreational focus.

EGR NA: Who would you say your main rivals in the space are?

KL: As far as I know we are alone in trying to fill this particular gap. It’s a completely new market in that sense. Maybe there’s a reason why we’re the only one but maybe we should be blessed we’re the first.

I would say that any product trying to offer competitive video gaming is a rival and there are things like the free-to-play 3D Tournament Poker on Steam which probably attracts some of the same audience.

The paying crowd of social poker games are also attractive to us of course – if you pay to play on Zynga, for example, we think you might be interested in a more strategic and fulfilling game so that’s definitely a target.

We also think any form of real-money poker is competition which is why we are targeting the US market so much because they have those competitive players and the absence of real-money poker.

EGR NA: Do you think you’ll be able to attract serious real money poker players with any actual cash wagering?

KL: The poker industry at the minute is committing almost unanimously to recreational players. If you are not a recreational player then no-one really wants you, so if you want to play seriously we can provide enough of a competitive environment that it’s worth your while.

And while you’re not wagering real-money, it doesn’t mean we are removing prize money. In the world of eSports there is a lot of prize money. Long term we hope to see big tournaments with this.

If we can tap into the eSports competitive infrastructure that’s reason enough for people to play competitively. The end goal is arenas filled with people watching pro gamers play Hands of Victory for multi-thousand dollar prizes.  That’s obviously far down the road but that’s what we dream about.

EGR NA: You’ve said the US is probably your key target market, how do you plan to establish yourself there?

KL: Part of the reason we like the US market is we think we can tap into the existing affiliate structure which has been built up and maybe now doesn’t have much to sell. We’ve spoken to people like Pokerfight and perhaps competitive forums like 2+2 would be good partners.

We think they can probably re-engage with some of their existing players who don’t have anything to sign up for other than DFS at the minute. Part of the reason we’ve introduced a browser version rather than a native app first is that it’s easier to take advantage of the existing affiliate infrastructure that way.

EGR NA: So you only have a browser version out initially; is it important to get an app version out?

KL: One of the benefits of the browser version is that we can do immediate upgrades and don’t have to wait two weeks to hear back from Apple before we can send out a new release.

It’s also a nod to the fact that our core market is different to the social poker scene because our audience is using tablets and PCs rather than their phone for gaming.