Q&A: Joerg Nottebaum, head of iPoker

Platech’s iPoker recently rolled-out a new portfolio of HTML5 and native smartphone and tablet products to provide operators with a more seamless multi-platform experience and to boost new player sign-ups.

eGaming Review caught up with head of iPoker Joerg Nottebaum to discuss the opportunities for mobile poker, iPoker’s recent changes to its rake system and the future of poker networks.

eGaming Review (eGR): Can you tell us more about the new mobile poker products you’ve launched?

Joerg Nottebaum (JN): We are launching native smartphone and tablet applications, in addition to HTML5 products, and have already seen strong results and the licensees are very happy. It’s a long process but we expect all our licensees to take this mobile product because everyone is aware how important mobile is for boosting player acquisition. If you look at other verticals such as casino and sports over the last couple of years, the number of mobile users has increased significantly but poker was a bit behind because the focus was just on revenue.

A player who plays multiple tables on his PC automatically generates more revenue than someone playing one table on their smartphone for five minutes. So mobile is not a game-changer in terms of revenue for poker, which will mostly stay on the download client, but when it comes to player acquisition and to make poker accessible, mobile is obviously key to that.

eGR: Do you think mobile poker is still in its experimental stage?

JN: It depends from what angle you look at it from. If you focus on revenues, rake and fees per player, it’s going to be lower by definition compared to a download client. But if you look at new players then mobile is already a very important channel for poker, particularly as an acquisition strategy as up to 50% of new poker traffic is coming through mobile these days.

eGR: Do tablets present more opportunities for online poker than smartphones?

JN: Smartphone devices are good because you can play poker wherever you go. We’ve not yet looked into the tablet population to see if there’s a real incremental increase of new players or revenues, or if there’s cannibalisation. However, I tend to believe that the smartphone client has a much bigger impact than the tablet version.

eGR: What is your opinion on the state of the online poker sector currently?

JN: Online poker has been around for more than 10 years. It’s had its boom times and normal product lifecycle tells you that after the boom time it will obviously flatten out. Poker lives from selling the marketing message of it being a skill game which you can make money from and this idea runs out at some point in time. A lot of markets then started to come up with regulation which places a major workload on everyone, whether it’s iPoker, PokerStars or any other company going into regulated markets.

eGR: Do you think poker has suffered from a lack of innovation?

JN: I would agree that poker has not been really innovative over the last couple of years but that’s mainly down to the challenges of regulated markets. I think the recent success of the Jackpot Sit&Go format, in our case Twister, was a good approach as it brought something completely new to poker and made it more marketable to casino customers who want to have fun and the spinning wheel is a recognisable element from casino games.

I think the industry will now find game-types in-between poker and other verticals but the problem is that if you alienate poker too much, you don’t get enough liquidity as the player is expecting a poker game. So the poker element has to be visible and remain there as the key thing, which makes it slightly tricky to come up with anything completely new and exciting.

eGR: How is iPoker’s new rake system performing?

JN: We launched it on 1 February in the dot.com market, as well as in Italy, and we plan to roll it out in the remaining regulated markets such as France and Spain. This is will be an important project for this year and, although we are at the very early stage, we think it will be beneficial for all markets. The goal is to find a fair player valuation for the customer as historically everyone was just looking at rake and fees. New players tend to play a few hands, lose the money and think that poker isn’t a game for them. Our solution is source-based rake.

eGR: How would you assess the health of poker networks in 2015?

JN: I think iPoker specifically is in a good place as we’re in partnership with most of the major sportsbooks and casino companies. There’s still room for the B2B network concept and we’re the biggest in that sense. There is certainly a trend of going standalone but there obviously needs to be enough liquidity.

With the new valuation, we see room for doing more marketing campaigns for poker so that the overall health of the iPoker network is strong. We’ll set the framework and give them the opportunity to cross-market poker to their existing databases as well as do marketing campaigns specifically for poker. I don’t really have a strong opinion on other B2B networks as I think there’s room for one significant network which is iPoker and think you’d struggle find licensees which are capable of investing heavily into poker.