Poker/casino site? Just curious if anyone knows how to make one?

[G33K]

I am curious does anyone know how to make a working casino preferably with texas holdem?

how much will it cost and will you accept monopoly money?

 

[allfyre]

By "Monopoly Money" do you mean Canadian dollars? :hehe:

Seriously though, a project like that, if it's going to be for real money is going to be a monumental undertaking to develop from scratch. You're looking at a couple of million $USD at least, a team of twenty people and a year's worth of work to get it done.

 

[G33K]

I take it that your in the business to know so much.

and I guess now I am looking for a rich investor.
LMAO

 

[allfyre]

I take it that your in the business to know so much.

and I guess now I am looking for a rich investor.
LMAO

I write software for a living, and I do play a fair amount of poker. Basically a project like that, to do it correctly and make it usable by the public is really a task. In a lot of ways it's like implementing a trading system.

Writing an online poker game is a snap. I could probably do it by myself in a week. A full-scale online poker room though is another matter. There's just a huge long list of reasons why something like that gets complicated, special security concerns, users on different platforms, money changing hands, etc.

It's just not a one man job at all. If it were then I would have gold-plated balls (instead of bronze).

Edit:
P.S. Rich investors are the only investors worth messing with.

 

[Domainate.com]

I am curious does anyone know how to make a working casino preferably with texas holdem?

how much will it cost and will you accept monopoly money?

1. You need the site and company owning the site to be run from another country, one that allows the running of online gambling sites. All the countries we know and love (US, Canada, UK, Mexico, etc.) are NOT among them. PokerStars and PartyPoker for instance are based out of Gibraltar. Better be ready to set that up as that should be fun.

2. You need a large staff of people for customer service among other things. To give an example, PartyPoker has a staff of over 1000 people in India doing customer service.

3. Developing the site alone would cost absolute buttloads (probably tens of thousands of dollars to get it done well and correctly). Casino/poker are among the most expensive to develop. Also, included in the staff should be programmers as who knows what bugs may surface.

4. So you have a developed site...but where are the players? SEO and advertisement for a casino/poker site costs HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars if not MILLIONS. Consider the fact that you're going up against competition that's already paying that much. Keep in mind that also to stay competitive, you may be giving away money to your new sign-ups. Some sites give hundreds of dollars each to new signups. In addition, if you go with affiliates to help advertising, you have to pay THEM too.

5. Security and legal issues abound whenever there's such a large flow of money, you should also have lawyers to CYA, and lawyers ain't cheap. Last thing you want is to be sued and lose everything.

I'm sure there's about 271842893 other things to making such a site, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. Bottom line, it's not one of those "hey, I feel like doing this today" kind of decisions. In poker for instance, even to go through a network like PrimaPoker which seems a lot easier, you still need a gaming license, which again I believe you'd have to get in a country like Gibraltar. All Prima then does is take away the money to develop the brains behind the site and the initial "growing pains" as people are connecting to a network of thousands of players. You'd still have to design a site, which again costs a lot compared to most sites. Worst of all, you're then competing with all the Prima network sites boasting exactly the same software as you, the best of which are paying as much advertising as regular poker sites, so you're saving no money there. You would essentially be in the position of a WWD reseller site having to compete on the level of GoDaddy to have any chance of succeeding.

Oh yea, and lastly about poker, since the poker boom is more or less slowing down, as people get settled with their favorite poker sites for online play, you have to win them off their favorite sites. Good luck doing that!

I know all this because I myself was looking into creating a poker site, mainly because I have a poker domain worth $50,000+ that can market itself pretty well. It was a lot more complicated than I thought though.

 

[HBK216]

Couldn't he partner up or assign a contract to one of multiple companies who handle such software for big offshore sportsbooks like Pinnacle, The Greek, CRIS, etc...?

 

[Domainate.com]

Couldn't he partner up or assign a contract to one of multiple companies who handle such software for big offshore sportsbooks like Pinnacle, The Greek, CRIS, etc...?

I don't know the ins and outs of the offshore sportsbooks, but I believe what you're talking about is akin to either:

1. Being an affiliate to a casino or poker site, in which case you may as well direct people directly to whatever site you're an affiliate of and forego making a site. That or you could also make a top sites list with affiliate links to all the sites listed.

2. The PrimaPoker situation I mentioned in my first post, where they are prividing their software and people are connecting to the Prima network to play poker, and you still need a gaming license to operate as such (PrimaPoker confirmed that).

 

[allfyre]

One thing you can do though is licence the casino software from another company. There are plenty of poker networks that offer services like this, letting you skin and market their software as your own site but there's only so much you can do with that.

 

[DeluxeNames.com]

I know all this because I myself was looking into creating a poker site, mainly because I have a poker domain worth $50,000+ that can market itself pretty well. It was a lot more complicated than I thought though.

Whats your 50k poker name?