Since the beginning of the global pandemic, online poker has been a hype topic in the iGaming world.
To know more about the latest trends and developments in the online poker industry, GBC Time has interviewed Nikola Novakovic, CEO of the white-label poker software provider – Run Your Own Poker Site. Nikola has talked about the peculiarities of the online poker niche, explained how to open your own poker room, and shared his company’s plans for the future.
In the iGaming market, there are many white-label solutions for online casino and betting platforms, and very few are dedicated solely to poker. How and why did you choose this niche?
We are ex-poker players so this was our area of expertise. In the beginning, we had so many ideas on how to improve players’ experience, but it took us a few years to get to the point where we can make things, we thought the poker software should have. Before that point, we were making features our customers requested, and we could not afford to make all these interesting things we have now.
How does software proving business in poker differ from the casino or betting niche? What are the distinctive peculiarities of the poker niche?
When you have a poker site, the house cannot lose, since players are playing against each other, not against the house. That is the good thing about poker. But on the other hand, in the online poker business, you need to have enough players online, while even a sole casino player can play slots, and do not care about being alone. But this is just the problem in the beginning, while later the poker players mass will just bring more and more players (so-called “poker site’s gravity”)
What kind of investment does one need to open an online poker room? How long does it take to go live with it?
With our software, you can start with “only” $1 500. The setup fee is from $3 000 for one app/platform (out of 5: Android, iOS, Windows, MAC, and the browser version – HTML5) to $9 000 for all. But we are fine with receiving half of the setup fee in advance, and half 30 days later.
That should cover standard customization and branding, plus optionally, the logo design and a basic web page. All that usually takes between 3 to 5 working days.
In your opinion, what technologies will impact online poker in 2024? Is the incorporation of AI and VR possible for a digital poker room?
I think VR would be interesting for players who like to socialize while playing or those who are skeptical about their opponents and if they are really human. However, serious poker players will just care about smooth gameplay and the ability to multi-tabling, even from mobile devices. In my opinion, the biggest impact would be the expanding of the connectivity and reaching new player masses that currently cannot play due to the unstable internet. After that, I would vote for adding more features from the gaming world like some supper powers that you can cast on a table, every once in a while, which will make Hold’em, even more, a game of the skill, as well as unlocking some cool and useful app features as you play more.
In the speech on SIGMA, you mentioned that the bots were the biggest threat to the poker industry. How do you address this problem at the Run Your Own Poker Site? What are the main ways of preventing a bot from entering a poker room? How to identify a bot, are there any specific behavioral patterns?
Not all the things I mentioned are something we already have, but by the end of 2024, we should have it all. We are working on a bot scoring system, where through a variety of problems a human can easily solve, we can mark the likelihood of someone being a bot and if we are not 100% but say 75% sure it is a bot, we can then prevent such a player from playing on certain tables. We monitor many things like the length of a session without a break, and the timeouts, device choice (bots prefer desktops), and we fire random captcha puzzles and store the score. Since we are a white label, it is up to our customers what they want to do with the potential bots and what anti-bot features they would use. There is no clear guide on how to stop bots because their developers can adapt and evolve, and the key is to keep changing things to make them give up and go to an easier site.
Which of your products are the most in-demand among the clients? What is the reason for that?
Currently, the main hype is about running the poker site in cryptocurrency. Over 50% of the new customers are asking for crypto. After that, I would say the super customizable Bad Beat Jackpots, the Network mode, and the Emojis & the predefined text chat buttons with voice-over.
What are the future prospects for the Run Your Own Poker Site? Are you planning to present any new products in 2024?
We have a very cool and hopefully a game-changing feature in mind for 2024 but we would like to talk about it once we complete it since we know the competitors will copy that, and that is fine, but we just want to go in history as the ones who introduced it first. I can promise that you will be the first to know once the premiere is ready.
