For U. S. online poker players since 2011’s “Black Friday,” the last couple of years have been some tough times. There are few options for players to take part in, although there are a handful of offshore sites that still cater to players. This has led to the rise of “free play” sites (especially on Facebook) and subscription based services. One of the latter is the recent focus of an article in a prominent California newspaper.
The San Francisco Examiner’s Tom Somach journeyed to the headquarters for PurePlay, located in downtown San Francisco, to find out the secret to their success. “What we’re doing is legal,” Jason Kellerman, the Chief Executive Officer and owner of PurePlay, said to Somach in an interview today. “We’re not a gambling site; we are a subscription-based poker site.”
In Kellerman’s viewpoint, PurePlay doesn’t violate laws against gambling because all of the tournaments offered by the site are free to enter. Players have two options to be eligible for play on the site: a player can pay a flat $25 per month fee or they can send in a special postcard that will allow them to access the site each month. Kellerman likens it to what the burger chain McDonald’s does with its popular Monopoly game; in that situation, customers aren’t bound to getting a prize piece through a meal purchase, they can also get one by request through the mail.
With that said, Kellerman admits that many players are paying the $25 per month rather than going through the postcard route. “It’s a matter of convenience,” he stated to Somach. “People don’t want to send in a postcard each month. Most of our customers give us a credit card number and we bill them every month.” Kellerman also noted that those players that pay for their subscriptions enjoy an ad-free game where those that go the free route have ads to contend with.
PurePlay doesn’t have access to the entirety of the U. S. due to certain states’ gaming laws (for example, most recently Florida made it illegal to use an electronic device for gaming; this resulted in sites such as PurePlay and ClubWPT pulling out of the state). PurePlay has also had its issues with complaints against the company. According to Somach, the Better Business Bureau reports of 33 different complaints between August 2010 and February 2013; of those 33 complaints, 30 have been satisfactorily resolved.
Somach states that the business of subscription poker sites is still a grey area because there is still money lost by those players who don’t cash. I. Nelson Rose, the gaming law expert, is a consultant for PurePlay and says that these sites fail to reach the legal threshold of what constitutes gambling. Rose notes the three components that must be present for something to be considered gambling (consideration, chance and a prize) don’t’ exist with subscription sites because the games are free (consideration).
Legal authorities contacted by Somach aren’t commenting one way or the other on the situation, however. Somach contacted the U. S. Department of Justice, who declined comment, while the California Justice Department’s Office of Gambling Control would not comment on the “legality or illegality” of PurePlay.
The subscription based gaming industry has had its ups and downs over the last decade, with such operations as CardPlayer’s SpadeClub and Duplicate Poker having long faded from the scene. While that has happened, ClubWPT and PurePlay have been able to have some success (PurePlay, which has been in existence since 2005, signed up its 1.5 millionth member in 2008, although Kellerman won’t comment on how many subscribers the site has today), especially after the “Black Friday” indictments closed several of the larger sites in the online poker industry.
What effect a “Black Friday” style legal action, federal regulation or the continuing state-by-state nature of current online gaming regulation would have on sites like PurePlay are difficult to ascertain. It is likely, however, that it wouldn’t serve them well to have a regulated industry anywhere lest they lose those customers they have worked so hard to get.
