The differences between poker and slots
You press a button to make a wager. Seconds later, the outcome is revealed. The part in between is what differentiates good slots from bad ones – it’s the entertainment.
It’s an incredibly simple model, and I’m continually impressed by the innovative new forms of entertainment between the wager and the outcome – jackpot rounds, megaways, crash games. In theory anything could work, but the most entertaining slots trigger the primal parts of your brain, stimulate a rush of adrenaline and dopamine, an intense feeling of excitement and arousal.
Poker has very little in common with this and yet the CEOs of big publicly traded gambling companies persist in treating poker like any other gambling game. It’s why they’ve failed – and why the poker market is again dominated by private companies run by poker players and, alas, by a worrying number of black-market operators.
Skill and community in poker
In poker, the thrill of a big win or loss is just part of the overall entertainment proposition. Yes, thrilling moments do happen – particularly in the key stages of major tournaments, but they aren’t as frequent as they are in slots. In poker, the gambling part is not the most important thing – and testament to this is the fact that people frequently play poker without gambling anything; the game is as much a pastime as any other across the world, and is completely unique by the mechanisms that drive the game.
Poker makes up for this slower pace by combining other forms of entertainment with gambling in a really powerful way. Unlike slots, which are mostly solitary, poker is always played against other people. Poker is a great way to socialise – whether it’s a group of friends playing a home game, colleagues team building together, or as a way to get out and meet new people.
Playing poker offers you the opportunity to become part of a community of like-minded people. It’s not a team sport, but it bonds you to others in the same way as other competitive individual activities do (such as martial arts or chess).
Being part of a community of like-minded people also helps you to learn and improve – and that’s the other part of what makes poker special.
The power of progress is real. Seeing yourself improve at a competitive endeavour is enormously rewarding, and triggers many of the same parts of the brain’s reward centre that gambling itself does. A typical game of poker is determined mostly by the decisions made by players – and learning to make better decisions means that you’re more likely to win.
A poker player working to improve at the game is experiencing a powerful feedback loop of positive, dopamine-triggering rewards – they’re making new friends, seeing tangible progress as they learn more, and winning more often as a result.
This is why when marketing poker we focus on these things so much. We send players on trips of a lifetime with their new friends, where they can challenge their skills against high-level opponents. It’s why poker players are so much more valuable (on average) than a player who plays only casino, bingo or sports. The poker feedback loop results in much greater longevity, without the same risk of harm. Although a poker player might, on any given day, generate only $20 or $30 in revenue, that player will stick around for years if you serve them well.
The state of poker today
The same factors that make poker difficult for casino executives to understand also makes it difficult for regulators to understand. In the last 10 years, poorly crafted regulation has seriously harmed the legal online poker market, leading to a rise in unregulated apps posing as play-money platforms but facilitating real-money play. These underground apps exploit the community aspect of poker by building poker ‘clubs’ where players can gamble under the guise of virtual currency exchanges.
Fighting back against these apps is no easy task. Although WPT Global is doing it every day (and so far, with real success), this is not something we can do on our own. I write this article in the hope that it will encourage you to think about poker in a different way. Will you join us in this battle?
