BetRivers may soon make its long-awaited foray into real money online poker, having obtained all the necessary regulatory approvals in Pennsylvania.
PlayPennsylvania learned last week from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) that the owner, Rush Street Interactive (RSI), had earned the green light. Communications director Doug Harbach told them:
There are no more steps; they are live.
RSI has not revealed a planned launch date. However, testing a poker product for launch is an expensive and time-consuming process that the company would not likely have gone through without firm plans to go live.
The product in question is based on the now-defunct Run It Once Poker (RIO), developed by professional poker player Phil Galfond and acquired by RSI for $5.8 million in 2022. Before the acquisition, RIO had served the international market. Although many in the poker community approved of Galfond’s vision, the site never built a sufficiently large user base to be commercially viable.
The US market has not seen a truly new poker product launch since PokerStars arrived in 2015. Although BetMGM Poker and Borgata Poker are more recent arrivals, both use technology from Partypoker, which has a longstanding presence in New Jersey.
In recent years, it has been a toss-up whether the next arrival would be the RIO-based BetRivers product or something from GGPoker, the traffic leader in the international market. However, recent developments make it more likely for GGPoker to take over operations of existing WSOP sites from Caesars and Evoke than to launch a separate product under its flagship brand.
- Read More: BetRivers Casino review
Pennsylvania Won’t Immediately Join Multi-State Networks
The choice to launch first in Pennsylvania is interesting. It’s the only large US market for legal online poker that hasn’t joined the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement (MSIGA), though it may still do so.
In practical terms, that means sites operating in Pennsylvania can’t pit their players against opponents in other states like New Jersey and Michigan.
For the existing multi-state operators, that’s a negative. However, it may be a positive for BetRivers in the short term. If it were to launch a single-state site in Michigan or New Jersey, it would be at a competitive disadvantage due to the lack of shared traffic. On the other hand, a synchronized and networked multi-state launch would be expensive and logistically challenging.
Starting in Pennsylvania means that BetRivers can initially focus on a single state without being at a disadvantage. If the product proves itself viable, then other markets can follow.
Ultimately, RSI probably envisions BetRivers Poker as a multi-state product. It has an iGaming monopoly in Delaware, which gives it a captive market of roughly 700,000 residents old enough to gamble. However, that’s not a big enough market for a viable standalone site, so it will need a multi-state network to capitalize on that advantage.
What to Expect From BetRivers Poker
Online poker is an extremely niche product. Historically, it has accounted for about 2% of Pennsylvania’s iGaming revenue. However, online casino revenue has grown quickly over the years, while poker has not. In recent months, poker’s share has slipped to around 1%.
That means RSI will want to hit the market with something different.
Unless BetRivers Poker is an additive presence in the market, it will be competing with PokerStars, WSOP, BetMGM, and Borgata for a share of just $2.5 million or so in monthly revenue. At the same time, poker has significant overhead costs, requiring its own security staff to prevent cheating, for instance.
The real value in offering poker may be to support the site’s other verticals. Even PokerStars, a company built around poker, once told investors it sees poker as an acquisition channel for other gambling products.
Even so, differentiation will be essential. Before RIO shut down, Galfond had been experimenting with some unique features that may reappear in BetRivers Poker.
First, he banned the use of external software (“HUDs”) to track opponent tendencies. As a beginner-friendly replacement for that functionality, RIO featured avatars that change based on a player’s behavior. For instance, a player betting and raising at an unusually high frequency may develop a wild look in their eyes, while a passive player may appear asleep. That conveys a simplified version of the info a HUD would provide but levels the playing field by presenting it in a form that an amateur player can readily understand.
Galfond also replaced a conventional “rakeback” rewards system with a Splash the Pot mechanic. The idea was to stimulate action by adding money to the pot at random intervals in cash games.
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