Amaya Gaming holds their 2015 Q3 earnings call, and there was a pipsqueak of a nugget hidden amongst all the bamboozling numbers.
When I play video games, I fell like I am in the movies. With my heart racing in a kick the bucket kind of way, and fingers trembling, waiting for the bad guy to walk into my cross hairs…I wonder…why would anyone want to play slot machines?
People play slot machines, blackjack, roulette and those other chance related games. That’s why PokerStars have branched out into those areas. But there is an anachronistic feel to them, like Christmas tree earrings in a summer sauna.
The people who play these dated Pong-like games will die. The new breed will take over the world. They will have higher expectations. They will demand a betting option that is spellbinding, sexy and skillful.
The team at Wait But Why has been writing about Elon Musk. Their final installment of their three-part series is called The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce, and they quote Musk when talking about ‘reasoning from first principles.’
Here is a quote from that very article:
“I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principle basis.”
I see this happen within poker.
When poker needs new vigor, we tweak it slightly. The excitement levels rise. Then they melt away into the darkness. The mercurial and the schizoid turn to other more interesting ways of passing the time. It reminds me of the day I learned to bunny hop on my BMX. I thought I was in my atoll of total supremacy, and then someone did an endo, and I was yesterday’s news.
Amaya recently held a teleconference to talk about their 2015 Q3 performance. There were a lot of numbers. I would rather spend my time walking very slowly around a quarantined leper colony than listen to numbers.
There was one thing that interested me. They said they were developing ‘a new poker variant targeting the larger and growing skilled video gaming community.’
That one sentence provided me with all the nourishment I needed. I raised my head from the pillow like a Sphinx rising from the sand. I was interested. There was a bonding between minds; a manifestation of love.
They were thinking like Musk.
They were reasoning from the land of first principles.
Instead of thinking of themselves as a poker company, they were thinking of themselves as an entertainment company. When surrounded by constellations of poker stars, it’s easy to be blinded. Hopefully, Daniel Negreanu and Bertrand Grospellier returned from BlizzCon 2015 with a great scouting report for Baazov and his team.
When you allow your thinking to expand beyond those cantankerous walls, then there is no end to the wonder. Amaya Gaming can create a new game – a hybrid of video gaming, poker, and casino. It will have to be exciting, look incredible, allow skillful players to shine, but also have enough of a luck element that even an old idiot like me can win from time to time.
They only have to look at the success of Spin & Go to see how online gambling sex can create perfect little babies. Imagine the cornucopia of wonder if Spin & Go had sex with Tomb Raider?
The eSports industry is growing at a far greater rate than poker.
The eyeballs at Amaya Gaming would have noticed that.
That’s why it’s time to breed.
