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Madhav ‘Maddy’ Gupta (cover image) is a popular name in the Indian poker industry and has been the driving force behind the Pride Poker Room (now re-christened to Baadshah Gaming Live) onboard Casino Pride, Goa for almost eight years now. Last year, Gupta floated the online site Baadshah Gaming. Gupta managed to bring Casino Pride onboard the online venture. The Casino Pride group bought a 30% stake in the site that offers multiple skill games like poker, rummy and fantasy cricket featuring a singular wallet across games.
Gupta resurrected the tournament action at Casino Pride by hosting the inaugural Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament series last month. The series attracted a modest yet strong turnout of poker players from across the country who were all praise for the structure and hospitality of Maddy and the Baadshah Gaming team.
We sat down with Gupta on the last day of the event and had a candid tete-a-tete about the response to the debut event and the current poker scene in the country both online and live. Gupta unabashedly puts his heart out and his take on the present scenario truly depicts that the current number game is not sustainable.
Here are excerpts from the conversation.
Hello Madhav, thank you for speaking with PokerGuru and congratulations on the success of the debut Baadshah Gaming Live Event. Afterthoughts and plans ahead?
So, at Baadshah Gaming we are very proud and excited to have hosted our inaugural event. The online space had our attention for a while and we of course come from a rich heritage and a background of live events. The way we see poker and ourselves in the market is like a mix between a bank and a hotel. We provide great service and make sure there is security for both the game play and the cash outs.
And that was the basic reason behind partnering up with Pride. We are not just a random website. We literally have ships anchored in the water, and we are going nowhere. We at Baadshah are truly a click and mortar business. That’s what we have showcased in the Baadshah Gaming LIVE series. This is the first of many.
We found that there isn’t much scope for new entrants in terms of players in the current market. The buy-ins are getting incredibly expensive and so is the skill difference between the old and the new lot. We are very happy with the support we got. There were many people who had stopped playing poker but came for this. That’s because it was at Casino Pride and because of the years of service that the Pride has provided.
We will have two types of events going ahead. One will be of this kind with ₹60-65K cumulative buy-ins. The idea is that with travel and accommodation overheads, we expect their total expense for the trip to be under ₹1 lakh.
Then we will have a second series which will be for your regulars and high stakes players. That will be our High Roller series with cumulative buy-ins of ₹3-4 lakhs. There, we will have more fun events like more re-buys and re-entry events. There will be an OFC, PLO and a big high-roller event with a buy-in of about ₹1 lakh.
In our experience, people usually have ₹50K expenses in a week playing online and that brings the total expense to roughly ₹26 lakhs in a year. At ₹26 lakhs if you want to have 1000 entries, 80% of the field will lose their money. That means 800 people will have to be developed next year to fund just current growth and not a growth per say. Where are these 800 players coming from? They aren’t.
Today of course you have closed groups where action is bought and sold but that’s not new money in the poker liquidity. That’s old money which is re-circulating. If new staking sites like StakeKings come to India, that may bring new money in the market but as far as the current scene is concerned, we believe that expenditures are too high. Of course, guarantees sound incredibly attractive and that’s what gets a player in, but at ₹26 lakhs, a player needs to win at least one title of one of the big guaranteed events every year to just break even.
We all know that tournament poker is incredibly high variance and therefore, it will take a couple years and you need to consistently make multiple scores to make any real money. I’m not as worried about the 200 that make the money. I’m more worried about the 800 that don’t make and how do they continue to fund it.
So, there will always be a difference between live and online. Live requires a certain level of dedication where you need to take three or four days out of your program, schedule, of work to travel to a different city, sit and play at the player end. In case of online, of course you can sit at home and play and that makes it a lot easier as well.
So, that was going to be our next question, while the Baadshah Gaming Main Event was going on, several huge events were taking place online. We saw many players more inclined towards those high value events. What’s your take on that? What do you think the future of poker in India will be, Live or Online?
There will always be a mix of both live and online. I don’t think that the categorisations will be that simple. I don’t think that any one will close and the other will be the only option, there will be both. There are players who like to play live and there are players who like to play online.
That subset is not always the same. It seems to be the same today because the entire market is small, so players who want to play a lot; end up doing both. But as you look at some more mature markets like America or even sort of Western Europe or even Eastern Europe for that matter, you have dedicated players who play only live and only play online as well and that’s always going to be this situation.
The market is so big, there will always be a room for companies that are operating outside the black and white. So, there will always be cash sites too, there will always be those unraked home games where the buy ins are in cash.
But we don’t ever see that kinds of field (like online) in a live poker tournament in the country. And do we have the locations to host such huge field events?
Are online guarantees currently bigger than live? Yes, they are but that doesn’t mean that this will always be the case. I think that over a period of time, certain brands will come up that will be able to pull in the bigger numbers. In terms of space requirements, of course it is sort of chicken and egg situation, but as requirement goes up, the operators will have an ability to give more space.
Take Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament this time for instance. Previously, when we used to do events at the Pride Poker Room 3-4 years ago, we used to keep ten odd tables. For this event we actually re-built the entire third floor to have 26 tables. Once you start factoring in day 1 A/B/C, you can start getting the 700-800 entry mark.
You can always segregate, today we have kept the condense format of 3 or 4 day event structure but that can always be a week or 10 days. International live events continue to get the sort of numbers because they do multiple days and have long schedules.
But that’s more because of the guarantee that attracts players to say a series like the WSOP. Online events on domestic sites currently beat the live guarantees easily. What’s your take?
So, obviously we were super conservative in our guarantees this time as well, it being a sort of a quickly pulled event. Our guarantees will go up as time goes by.
While I don’t want to comment on any particular firm’s marketing strategy or player acquisition approach, we at Baadshah don’t believe that the current guarantees in the online scenario is sustainable.
Yes, your unique entries across these websites may be fairly large but the question is how much has been given away in free tickets, how much is being given to stake players from different firms. You go to your popular action selling sites, and you’ll notice firm owners buying action of players in their own events. That’s something you never see live because its easily recognizable.
There is a veil of secrecy in the online zone that lets you do that and that is a concept, that at the Pride, we have never understood. We do not believe that it is fair for us (as the house) to buy action of any player playing against other players.
We as a site do not do any cash, any credit or any affiliate. We are not here to just make bunch of money for today, so we are not looking at big numbers. In terms of live, we have a current clientele and we will continue to push our live strategy and run the nose bleed games in Pride. But on the online model, our goal is to focus on micro and mini stakes for the foreseeable future. Till we believe that there is enough liquidity in new players and new blood gets in the system and really our plan is to grow them to the next level.
Every other website has a sponsored pro, Baadshah Gaming does not. Any particular reason?
A team pro is supposed to provide three benefits to the firm- the number one benefit is that they add a bunch of credibility to the firm, secondly, to go and advertise for the firm and finally, they should have some feedback for the players and the pro himself can help the players.
When we looked at all three factors, we found currently that as far as Baadshah Gaming is concerned, none of these were being answered. Baadshah Gaming with Casino Pride and its founders already has a credibility angle, you know we have been in operation as a live setup for almost a decade.
As far as the players are concerned, the pros are not providing anything to the players today and are there for their own benefit, so we have a very different approach for the pros.
What we are going to be doing over the pros is and you will hear an announcement from us shortly on this, but we want to build pros from the Baadshah Network itself, players who played on Baadshah Gaming and we want them to be our genuine pros.
Our Baadshah pro will be a mentor both internally and externally. They will help us be honest, keeping their ears on the ground in terms of what the community wants.
You are a veteran of the industry. What has changed in the past 10 years? How will Baadshah Gaming stand out based on your experiences?
A lot, I remember when I started playing we used to play, like we had a group of 6 or 7 of us in Delhi and we were the first table out of Delhi. We started playing live poker, literally for the first couple of months, we used to play with Monopoly money.
Today, we need to promote ethical poker which means ensuring that players are not getting screwed over, and that they are secure. Security and services are the only two things that we are interested in and that is something that we will continue to push on. I see a great future for the game, I think definitely the live and online both are incredibly important for us to ensure that the right kind of players come on board. I mean my monthly marketing budgets are higher than the tech costs for entire Baadshah Gaming. In terms of funding, we looked around and did funding based on 18 months of expenditure with zero revenue. Assume that we get zero revenue for 18 months, by 0, I mean 0. If we get 0 revenue what is the number we need to head for 18 months of expenditure and that we put into the bank on day 1. So, in terms of that, we have been a lot more aggressive, so I know that’s not a concern for us.
The Pride group has 30% stake in Baadshah. How does that help? (Not talking only in monetary terms.)
The Baadshah Gaming’s association with Casino Pride was never about the money because frankly, they have come in as a strategic partner. We could have possibly looked at a better number if we looked outside as a financial partner; given sort of our own background in the industry. With Pride, the main aspect was the credibility that Pride brings, like a I said, we’re not here to be an overnight sensation.
Maddy signs off!
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