Interview with subscription-based poker room PurePlay CEO Jason Kellerman

PurePlay.com, the internet’s largest subscription-based online poker room, recently relaunched with a new platform and a big promotional push. CEO Jason Kellerman took some time to answer a few questions that we (and many readers) had about his room, subscription-based poker and the future of the industry in general.

Online poker is a competitive market, and your model seems fairly intuitive. Why haven’t we seen a mainstream success story involving a subscription-based room to this point?

In terms of mainstream companies, as you know, they tend to shy away from poker for prizes in general, but Pogo, EA’s very successful casual gaming site is similar in terms of structure, and although Pogo does offer poker, it’s primary focus is on more casual games. In general, our model is patented, so it is not surprising to us that no major company has attempted to copy our model.

Do you expect major rooms to integrate the subscription model at some point?

When we launched our subscription model in November 2005, most rake sites were focused on the 3-5MM real money online poker players, and still are. We have always been focused on the 30-50MM online poker players that play for fun and would like to play for prizes, but don’t want to risk losing money. Going forward, I would not be surprised to see a rake site pursue the subscription model for non-U.S. players, but they’ll have to come up with a way around our patent if they are to pursue U.S. customers

Your initial launch was almost three years ago. How have your goals for the room changed since then, and how has the potential for the success of your model changed?

We launched our subscription model in November 2005 (2 years ago), and very little has changed in terms of our goals. Again, we continue to be focused on the tens of millions of online players who want to play for prizes but don’t want to risk losing money. What has changed is the market – we have seen tremendous acceptance of our model by consumers, and we’ve seen a shift away from rake sites as a result of the UIGEA, which has helped our growth.

You bill the room as legal poker, yet subscription-based live poker league National Poker Challenge has run into problems with state officials in Washington and Arkansas. As your room grows, do you anticipate similar issues?

When we were developing our model back in 2004, we hired many of the world’s leading gaming attorneys to ensure we developed it in a way that would not run afoul of gaming laws. Our model is a non-gambling model, from a legal perspective or otherwise. Because we’ve structured it as a non-gambling model, we do not expect to run into the same issues as the National Poker Challenge.

Are there are plans to expand the room into cash games? What about additional membership tiers?

Currently we have two tiers of membership – free players and subscription players. Free players get instant access to $25,000 per month in cash prizes, and have to view ads during gameplay. Subscribers get instant access to over $125,000 per month in cash prizes, as well as a suite of additional features such as individual performance ratings, live chat customer service, no ads during the game, level-playing field tournaments, etc. We do expect to roll out additional tiers of membership (such as a “high roller” membership) in the future. We currently have no plans to roll out cash games, as it appears difficult to do this without it becoming a gambling business.