CardRunners, the original online poker training site, has announced plans to stop releasing paid content from June 1 with all further videos published on YouTube and Holdem Manager.
The online poker training site that kick-started a revolution will cease producing paid training videos on June 1 and move exclusively onto YouTube where they plan to release training videos periodically.
CardRunners broke the news both in the blog section of their website and via Twitter and confirmed that the site would also change in the coming weeks, although it didn’t say it would close down.
At its peak, CardRunners was making millions of dollars per year after its founders, Taylor Caby and Andrew Wiggins stumbled across the lucrative practice of recording their online poker sessions and providing them with a commentary for a fee.
In addition to over 3,000 hours of content, CardRunners was also the home to the personal blogs of Kara Scott, Taylor Caby, and Andreas Torbergsen, and had a forum containing 108,165 threads, 909,351 posts, and 129,6423 members. CardRunner’s YouTube channel has 3,742 subscribers, but there hasn’t been any fresh content published in over a year.
The demise of the once-dominant online training site shouldn’t come as a surprise. Phil Ivey and his team recently closed The Ivey Poker League citing the current state of the online poker industry as their primary reason.
Phil Galfond’s RunItOnce is the market leader, and even Galfond has seen the need to innovate and change to keep RunItOnce fresh and alive by creating an online poker room.
One of the problems with online training sites is their lack of innovation over the years. With so many different ways for top coaches to educate beginners, it always frustrated me to see a slew of videos recorded by Joe Bloggs the professional poker player talking about his decision process.
Today, you can watch some of the top professional players in action on Twitch, listen to them talk through their thought process, and even ask them questions within seconds of the play entering the record books.
Twitch satisfies our appetite for instant connection to such a degree I can see it being the vehicle for choice for anyone wanting to learn more about the game.
CardRunners will cancel monthly subscriptions with immediate effect and return a pro-rata fee to those who have subscribed long term. In addition to publishing video content on YouTube, the CardRunners team will also release content on HoldemManager.com designed to help players better understand their HUD statistics.
Caby and Wiggins founded CardRunners in 2005 when the world was going Chris Moneymaker crazy and in their prime had the likes of Brian Hastings, Isaac Baron, Cole South, and Mike McDonald on the payroll.
