PokerPro has been described as the perfect marriage of internet and live poker, combining the speed and mistake-free play of internet poker with the live social interaction of playing in a poker room. It’s not hard to understand the table’s burgeoning reputation when you translate that percentage into hard currency; it’s considerably more profitable than the standard poker table.

The table is exclusively distributed by gaming giant Aristocrat throughout most of the world (though PokerTek places its product directly within U,S. and Canada), and there is no doubt that PokerTek has benefited from Aristocrat’s international profile, not least during trade exhibitions where PokerPro has drawn universal acclaim.

Jon Bruford travelled to their North Carolina offices shortly after G2E 2006 and met Lou White, CEO of PokerTek.

Casino International: How was G2E for PokerTek?

Lou White: It was a wonderful show for us, our booth was pretty much a zoo for most of G2E. With automated poker as an emerging segment within the gaming space, it’s no longer an ‘if’, it’s ‘how’ and ‘when’. More and more operators are becoming familiar with the benefits of automated poker, and so there are more and more places where poker players can play automated poker. So, although to some degree it is still considered a novelty within the industry, it’s becoming more accepted. We also showed for the first time a brand new Heads Up, Poker Pro table, a very cool product that has a lot of benefits for players and casinos. For players, Heads Up is an awesome test of skill. Heads Up is two players going head-to-head on a smaller two-seat table. if you look at what players do online as a leading indicator of what’s happening in the poker space, Heads Up is becoming very, very popular already; it’s a great way to play poker. The PokerPro Heads Up table allows casinos to provide a whole new poker experience. The Heads Up table has the opportunity to generate 50- to 80% of the revenue in about 20% of the space of a traditional 10-seater table, so it’s a great game to offer players. We announced the PokerPro Heads-Up table at G2E and received an enthusiastic response from existing and potentially new customers.

CI: What do you see as the main obstacle to operators embracing PokerPro? Is it a question of education about the product, because the statistics for potential earnings would suggest operators are biting your hands off to get the table.

LW: If you were to ask me that question 18 months ago I would have said that our only obstacle is player adoption. Automated poker at that time was revolutionary and there as a big question mark as to whether players would want to play poker with an automated dealer. It’s now clear to us that a meaningful segment of poker players love it the first time they see it, a segment on the other end don’t like it and prefer to play with a human dealer, but the largest segment is in the middle, they’ll play either way. The other thing we’ve seen is that the more time most players spend on the table the more they seem to like it. It’s just a very cool way to play poker. I’m an avid poker player and truly love the game, if I’ve got four hours to spend in a casino, and was given a choice between seeing 100 hands or seeing 150 hands, I’m going to go for 150 hands every day because it’s just more poker for me while I’m in a casino. So you might ask why there aren’t tens of thousands of PokerPro tables all over the world? It’s a good question, and part of the answer is that like any new technology it can be viewed as threatening, not only to the dealers but to the staff that operate a poker room. If they look at an automated poker table and say ‘oh my, what if every table was instantly replaced? What would that mean to my job?’ I liken it to when ticketing first came out with slot attendants, there was a lot of worry about jobs.

PokerPro has the potential to significantly grow the overall market for poker and, so far, hasn’t replaced any dealer jobs that we know of at any of our customers. In some ways, dealers even view our tables as good for them. For example. many of our customers are spreading games on PokerPro that dealers would rather not deal anyway, like single-table tournaments, multi-table tournaments, and, Omaha, If you’re a dealer in a room, you get pushed every 45 minutes and occasionally you end up on the Omaha Eight-or-Better table which feels like a penalty – your pay just got cut in half during that shift because Omaha is so painfully slow to deal. So by utlizing PokerPro technology to spread game types that the dealers aren’t really that excited about dealing anyway, then using it to attract a new type of player into the poker room, we expand the market for poker. Long term, I think what will happen is casinos will perhaps slow down the hiring and training of new dealers. But our technology can offer a win to the poker room staff, too.

Another great example is the Heads Up table. I have been dozens of poker rooms around the world; I have yet to see Heads Up spread, it’s just not done. It’s wildly popular online, but a casino won’t spread it, so our Heads Up table’s another great example where we come into a casino and allow them to build a market for poker but do it in a way that’s not confrontational with existing staff.

CI: How useful has it been an organisation like Aristocrat behind you in terms of distribution and their overall experience of the global market, nott to mention their size?

LW: Well, first of all they own just over 19% of our company so they are a very large shareholder, secondly they distribute our product outside of US and Canada, and so what it does for us is it gives us a lot of credibility in the gaming industry. Secondly they are a very smart company; they are run by very smart people and they have been able to help us with speed bumps, pot holes, brick walls that we may have run into without Aristocrat’s guidance, so it’s a fantastic relationship. I think you’ll continue to see that relationship benefit both sets of shareholders.

CI: So what else is there in the product line-up, is PokerPro essentially PokerTek or is there more to come?

LW: We get asked frequently, ‘wow, you have a really good core set of technologies, why don’t you take that out into the pit?’ You know, ‘why don’t you take that out of the poker room into other places in the casino?’ That’s a siren, luring us off course and we’re going to avoid that at all cost. We are going to be maniacally focused on the poker room, and doing two things in the poker room; #1 providing a very cool gaming experience for poker players and #2 help improve the economics of running a poker room for the operator.

Looking forward, I would say now that we have this base of technology inside the poker room are there other things we can do during the game, with the poker player that might enhance their gaming experience and create additional profit opportunities for the casino. So the answer to that question is absolutely yes and we are working on a lot of different products in that area.

CI: Do you see the core customer of PokerPro as being newcomers, because they can ‘grow up’ with this table, if you see what I mean?

LW: I think there’s a couple of different customer segments; the first would be the person who jumps off of the internet and for the first time goes into a casino to play poker. We hear from people sometimes, ‘You know this is just like playing online, so why would someone leave their house to go and play PokerPro in a casino?’ Invariably when someone asks me that my immediate response is ‘Have you ever been to a pub?’ And invariably they say yes, and I reply why would you go to a pub, you can drink a beer in your house and it’s less expensive… the reason they go out to a Pub is to be with other people… so PokerPro has all the benefits of playing online in that it is fast and there are no mistakes but also has the benefits of being in your favorite poker room… you are out socializing with other humans and get all the fun and excitement of a casino environement.

The other set of players are the existing poker players and I’m talking about people who play, and I’m not going to say professional, not so much the people that you see on TV, but there are tens of thousands of people who make money playing poker and that’s how they derive their income, so for that person or for a semi-professional player, PokerPro is fast and so they get to see more hands per hour sort of like getting a 50% raise. What person would walk away from a 50% raise? So for the existing player it’s simply an economic decision. They are playing poker to make money, and because of the speed of the game and the reduction of mistakes, they have the chance to make more when they play on PokerPro.

CI: There’s an estimated 7000 poker tables in the world, what’s the anticipated market share that you can reach in that, what level are you hoping to hit with PokerPro?

LW: I believe that within most poker rooms there is a market place for around10% of their tables to be automated. I know the player demand is there, and the economics are there for the casino. Once poker players become more acclimated to PokerPro and experience the benefits and coolness of it first hand. I think there is an opportunity to extend beyond that 10%. I have a hard time forecasting where that ends up, but the good news for PokerTek and our shareholders is that even at 10% over the near term equates to somewhere around 700 automated poker tables worldwide.

In addition to that, we have installed tables with several customers who did not offer poker and chose to launch their poker room with all PokerPro tables, so in addition to garnering some percentage of existing poker rooms, PokerPro will open up new venues for poker that don’t exist today and would probably not exist if not for the technology.

CI: What’s the average lifespan of a table?

LW: We believe the tables will last somewhere in the three- to five-year range, we are using very standard off-the-shelf Windows-based technology, and we’ve had very, very good performance from them to date.

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