Discovering a new era 04/09/2008

Jake Pollard

Barry Shulman dreams big - he wants his recently launched SpadeClub poker site to attract one million players and become the largest operator of subscription based online poker. Don’t bet against Barry. As founder of Card Player Media, publisher of Card Player Magazine, he’s already built a poker-industry empire with a reputation for delivering high-quality information products to millions of poker fans worldwide. 

His vision for SpadeClub is that the site will attract millions of recreational gamers worldwide. The SpadeClub offering is part social community, where players enjoy communicating with each other as much as they enjoy playing the game itself, and part ongoing tournaments where free and paid members can vie for cash prizes. 

Another reason for Shulman’s confidence is that the business model for SpadeClub is entirely legal in most of North America. With rules based on legal sweepstakes, SpadeClub skirts the UIGEA regulations by virtue of the fact that there’s really no “gambling” involved, since players don’t place cash-money bets and risk losing those bets. 

No buy-in required for this site 

There are two tiers of membership: free and exclusive. Free members can play in monthly tournaments with the opportunity to win US$10,000. Exclusive members enjoy added benefits for a monthly fee (currently US$19.99), including access to substantially higher tournament prize wins of more than US$100,000. Exclusive members also enjoy a big list of non-cash benefits, like discounts on partner events such as Card Player Magazine’s cruises, training courses like the World Poker Tour’s boot camps, prize draws for travel/accommodation and admission to exclusive parties such as the two held at the Playboy Mansion in May 2008. The SpadeClub site also features a set of social networking utilities to enhance the player’s experience and support the membership scheme that helps allow SpadeClub to remain legal. 

One look at SpadeClub’s website and the emphasis on the subscription model becomes clear. In a section marked “Why it’s not gambling?” SpadeClub says: “Gambling is risking money for a chance at winning a prize or something else of value. SpadeClub is not a gambling site – you are never asked to place a bet or risk money on a poker tournament or any game. SpadeClub allows all entrants an equal opportunity to succeed in Spade- Club’s tournaments, and entry requirements are based on sweepstakes laws.” 

Explaining this further, Card Player and SpadeClub’s chief marketing officer, Tim Resnik says: “When developing our plans, we looked to the casual gaming sphere for inspiration. Casual gaming has successfully incentivised players, replacing money awards with badge or token systems. We decided to implement a variant of that: we use a system of points and tokens as the buy in for no-limit Texas Hold’em tournaments – there is never any sort of cash buy-in – but we award cash prizes of US$100,000 per month. 

Card Player seemed to have come up with a business model that could legally circumvent UIGEA legislation that was meant to oust online poker from the US. The next step was for the Shulmans to face the task of finding a software team capable of developing SpadeClub to their high standards for quality game play, with the scalability, reliability and flexibility they demanded. 

“Barry and Jeff knew from the start that platform performance was essential, because the mass pull and social networking element was so central,” says Resnik. “They had heard some horror stories of online poker companies going bust because of issues such as excessive crashing and downtime, and with our magazine reputation on the line, we had to be certain we had a good software development company behind us.” 

Enabling the dream with a reputable tech team 

The company they called was CyberArts, and specifically co-founder and chief architect, Chris Derossi. “From the first call CyberArts was a contender for our business,” says Resnik. “The biggest thing for us was scalability. Right from the start we knew we needed to have the ability to cater to hundreds or thousands of players in each tournament. CyberArts demonstrated immediately its software could handle this kind of peak load without flinching.” 

Barry Shulman quizzed Derossi on a number of issues, and was impressed enough from the phone call to go into a meeting. “Derossi has an enviable background,” comments Resnik. “The level of tech knowledge he acquired at Apple and his enormous understanding of the poker industry blew us away.” 

Once development began, Resnik became impressed by the personal attention from Derossi and the small but efficient development team, capable of fast deployment and on-time delivery despite changes and new factors thrown into the decision-making mix, “This was not just us purchasing software; it became a vital partnership. We developed a very strong relationship. When a co-owner like Derossi gives the pitch and then meets his commitments with obvious diligence, you build a lot of trust. CyberArts made us feel very comfortable at a time that could have been fraught with anxiety – planning the details and trying to minimise the risk of introducing a completely new concept to the online poker world.” 

The SpadeClub team felt so comfortable that Resnik was able to leave Card Player for three weeks during the platform development process to go on his honeymoon, “I should have felt stressed and tense. Things in software development always go wrong or are delayed, but there weren’t any hiccups or surprises. And luckily for me, none during my honeymoon,” he laughs. 

CyberArts chairman, Ken Arnold concurs: “Our engineering team, led by our vice-president of technology Rudi Diezmann, are enterprise software programmers, rather than just exceptional gaming developers,” explains Arnold. “We hired developers with many years’ experience creating fail-safe systems for large companies who needed near-100% uptime. We spent over two years developing our Foundation gaming platform, software that is invulnerable to crashes, is glitch-free, and is capable of supporting the kinds of loads SpadeClub anticipated in serving thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players. That’s why we got the job, and why Resnik could honeymoon in peace!” 

Beta testing completed in December 2007and Spade- Club publicly launched in February 2008, Card Player Media’s 20th anniversary year. Resnik couldn’t be happier “The product has scaled well from zero players to where we are now, and we feel confident it will be able to handle the heavy loads we anticipate as we add members and players.” Asked about the stability of the product, particularly during such an important year milestone, Resnik adds: “No, there hasn’t been an issue with customers dropping off.” 

Customisation for the competitive advantage 

In addition to scalability and stability requirements, Card Player needed very specific, unique software features and user interface elements. “One of the reasons we chose CyberArts,” says Resnik, “is their ability to be flexible. I wanted to introduce features that would reflect the power of our brand and support the social networking and community features core to our concept. Plus, members were unlikely to flock to our site, and keep coming back, if our ‘look and feel’ was the same as they would find at other gaming sites. CyberArts was able to meet these demands and create a totally new gaming environment with bells and whistles found on no other site.” 

Such features included easy creating and display of graphical elements for badges, avatars, odds calculators and house advertisements and promotions. “While we currently don’t carry third-party advertising, it is part of our business plan, so we need software that can easily support in-game adverts in the future.” 

This didn’t faze CyberArts, as customisation has long been the company’s mantra. “We understand a company’s need to be individual and unique. Everyone wants that kind of competitive advantage,” Arnold comments. “CyberArts’ Universal client accomodates unique graphics, Flash and html for a seamless user experience. Gaming operators want sites that are customisable to present a unique ‘front’ right down to the last pixel, displaying brand-specific information, images, marketing messages and games in a customised manner.” 

Unlike many online poker companies that are US facing, the SpadeClub team sleeps easy. They don’t have to worry about the laws, regulations and the successful enforcement (or not) of UIGEA, or these factors might impinge on SpadeClub’s future business plans. Commenting on this, Resnik says: “We’re taking small steps at the moment toward expanding into multi-language features and different jurisdictions. But we know we have the right partner to do this when the time comes. CyberArts showed us that implementing a software platform, whilst hard work, can be a smooth process. I can’t help wonder what disasters we might have experienced if we had gone with someone else.” Concluding, Resnik says, “We needed design flexibility to enhance our business and marketing ideas for community and social networking, enormous factors in supporting our legal status in the US, but not at the expense of scalability and uptime. We feel very fortunate that we were able to find exactly the right partner for this ambitious venture, CyberArts.”

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Posted: 04/09/2008