Pres. of WPT Global: "If You're a Nit, These Aren't the Games For You"
GipsyTeam
20 August, 12:29
The President of WPT Global talked about creating a sustainable (and active) poker ecosystem with AI, maintaining game integrity, and of course, combatting RTA.
Most of us know Jungleman by now, but the name Alex Scott isn't as familiar. Back in 2005, he spent 4 months promoting WPT Online in Edinburgh, just after the poker boom had kicked off. He spent time as a freelance poker journalist, then a business analyst for PokerStars, before staying for 7 years at Microgaming Poker. Nowadays, he's back at WPT Global, starting as General Manager in 2022 before becoming President at the start of 2024.
One of the fantastic things WPT has done is institute something called RIP – Rewarding Integrity in Poker. When game integrity is violated and evidence is brought forward, players can receive a bounty of sorts. Apparently, the program has already paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Alex says he wants the program to be a deterrent.
On Cate's Winning the Game of Life podcast, Alex Scott talked about WPT Global's strategy to become a leading online room. This includes balancing the types of players in a online pool, making poker a spectator sport, as well as combatting threats like RTA.
– Daniel Cates: Just making sure. We're still taking on the big boys, right?
– Alex Scott: Absolutely. That's what I've been trying to do ever since I left Full Tilt and PokerStars back in the day. I've been trying to build something else to be a compelling alternative to the big boys. I'm really pleased to be somewhere where I have the genuine opportunity to do that.
– DC: Why don't you tell me what WPT has got cooking?
– AS: One key thing is that when we launched, one of the things that gave us a chance of success was joining this established poker network. It was an Asia-facing poker network, so it gave us the starting point we needed to enter this industry as a brand new startup online poker site. We've seen a couple of people try, and they always struggle with the same issue: where do you find your first players? Where do you build that critical mass? It's very difficult to do. Joining this poker network, which is why we have Chinese currency tables, by the way, is one of the things that helped us establish ourselves, grow, and be successful.
The other thing is that we're an action poker room. There's a lot of money going into the pot preflop in our No-Limit Holdem games. Most of them have three blinds, and most of them also have an ante. They're action games, and if you're a nit, these aren't the games for you. We're not the site for you if you're a nit, frankly.
I'm just going to emphasize that we're an action poker site, and there's a lot that we do to encourage action and keep the games fun, fair, and sustainable, which we can talk about later in the podcast.
WPT Global's Poker Ecology Management
The way that WPT Global aims to structure its poker ecology has a specific purpose; sustainability. Rather than have recreational players sign up, get stacked by a younger version of Linus, and then uninstall forever, WPT's President thinks they have a remedy. AI is involved, but that's apparently the WPT Global "business has been built on it for years."
"How do we ensure that players can have a positive experience, that they can win more than they can anywhere else?" Alex proposed, then answered. "It's about how you organize the games, how you distribute your player pool across the tables."
WPT Global's President asked Cates to envision the perfect private game. What qualities would it have? Jungleman replied that it should have VIPs, not many "intimidating" players, and a similar skill level among the field.
Alex Scott agreed on all counts:
On VIPs: "First of all, you said you need to invite some VIPs to the game, and you're absolutely right because a game that's only pros is not going to last very long. Pros don't generally want to play under those conditions. Pros play together for different reasons; they play for competition. Maybe at the end of a tournament, you end up in a position where a bunch of pros are playing together, but generally, if you're organizing a private game, you're not going to invite only pros to it."
On intimidating players: "This is something that kind of applies more live than online, but you're looking for people with social skills, right? People that make it a fun game to play. Poker is a unique game, well maybe not unique, but it's different from many other casino games in the sense that you can change the value of the people around you. You have a direct impact on the players around you. You can scare them away, or you can make them feel welcome, you can give them a good time. So when you organize your perfect private game, you're actually looking for people that bring some fun to the game and bring social skills."
On skill level: "If you've got a couple of really terrible players and then a couple of really great players, then the money is going to flow very quickly from the terrible players to the great players, and the game won't last very long. So you need some way of managing that skill disparity between the players."
4.5
WPT Global is the newest poker site today. After years of experience in the international live tournament market, in 2022 the WPT company decided to expand its influence to online platforms — and you can benefit from their welcome bonus.
Using a machine learning model, WPT Global categorizes each of its players. The process is ongoing, starting from your first hands and adjusting as you play more.
"We measure the skill level of every player, and then we essentially categorize you in one of six categories," Alex Scott explained. "We can simplify it to be casual players and pros. Broadly speaking, casual players and pros, and the idea is to ensure the right balance of casual players and pros at each table."
Using the system, the seats are allocated to different kinds of players. At the popular 8-max tables, six seats are for recreational players and the two remaining are for experienced regs or pros.
"It's about establishing this perfect balance," Alex told Jungleman. "We believe that for most of our games, that balance of six recreationals and two pros means that the game lasts as long as possible and is as sustainable as possible.
We're not completely segregating the players from each other, I want to make that clear. If you're a pro, you always have a table to sit at at any given stake. It's just that you will need to start tables more often if you're a pro. Once you do start a table though, there can only be one other pro that sits at that table with you."
By controlling player skill disparity in this way, WPT Global essentially prevents active table selection, or at least makes it magnitudes more difficult. From the site's perspective, bumhunting will be eliminated, but it's easy to see why some professionals might not like the restriction. However, it may create better conditions for casuals, plus the regs that get into those games or start tables. Alex spoke to the concerns of professionals;
"Nobody's saying here that pros are all bad, by the way. Pros have a really important role to play in the game. The game is a lot less sustainable without any pros.
If you invented a theoretical poker site where everyone's a fish, that poker site wouldn't make as much money. The games wouldn't be as sustainable as if you added just the right number of pros into the mix. What we see is that when there are no pros at all, games don't start as often because recreational players are very averse to playing under those conditions, very averse to playing short-handed game conditions. They really prefer to play at tables that are mostly full."
Alex firmly assured Jungleman and listeners that WPT Global is not "anti-pro" or "anti-winner" and that pros do play an important role in the ecosystem.
It's impossible to finish a poker podcast or interview in 2024 without speaking about game integrity. Matt Berkey and CoinPoker's Patrick Leonard covered it just a few days prior, and that podcast is also worth checking out. Naturally, Daniel had to ask the mandatory questions about what WPT Global is doing and plans to do to maintain fair online poker games.
"I mean for me, game integrity is one of the most interesting areas of online poker. It's something that I've worked in pretty much my whole career. My first job out of university was with PokerStars, where I started in the customer support team. Part of the role involved looking into collusion cases, and later I got trained on bot detection tools. I've worked in game integrity for a really long time and I've seen it evolve.
I would kind of characterize it as an arms race.
The online poker site has a strong incentive to police the games and make them safe. Not a foolproof incentive, but a strong incentive particularly for things like collusion."
Alex explained the concern about collusion in his industry early on. Through investment, custom tools, and training, he says it was pretty much eradicated. One of the reasons he says it's so difficult, even today, is big data.
Prior to big data and the ability to analyze it, collusion was an arms race. Once we got Big Data and found out how to interrogate it, it just became instantly obvious who was colluding and who wasn't. It's kind of a solved problem now.
I challenge anybody to get away with colluding at scale on Stars or WPT Global.
Hearing such a challenge, it's impossible not to think of Chris Moneymaker's similar proposition at the start of 2024. In a video call with Ebony Kenny, he told the community that $100,000 would go to anyone who could successfully run a bot on their platform. To cut a long story short, a player almost completed the challenge, but not before ACR canceled it.
In contrast, Alex Scott of WPT Global seems to understand poker site security slightly better than ACR's ambassadors did.
Moving on to more specific areas of concern, Alex Scott talked about bots and RTA, plus how the two have progressed.
"Luckily, in the early days, RTA was really bad. The very first RTA was really weak-tight and would give you terrible advice that would cause you to lose. So why would you use it? Generally, people who did use it experimented with it and very quickly found it was terrible and didn't continue using it. So it wasn't a threat and didn't really cause any damage.
But today, RTA, with advances in GTO and solver technology, has become more sophisticated. Even a couple of years ago, it wasn't really feasible to run a lot of GTO simulations in real-time quickly enough to be able to tell the player what to do. The technology wasn't powerful enough to respond quickly enough to give you the decision in time to take the action at the table. But now that is possible."
Alex Scott even says that bots are becoming less of a concern than RTA, probably due to the sophistication of data collection and analysis.
"The arms race has moved on from collusion and it's moved on from bots as well, actually, for the most part. RTA is the cutting edge of game integrity today."
To illustrate future impacts, WPT's President pointed to backgammon. The game's online popularity was cut short because of solvers, which eventually had a cancerous effect. Although a solution eventually figured out how to compare player actions to known solver actions, it was too late.
"What happened in Backgammon was that the online explosion and the rise of solvers happened simultaneously, and the Backgammon sites couldn't fight quickly enough to save the game. The game of backgammon has pretty much died out online. It's still there, but it's very niche. Nobody's really playing it for significant money; there are no enormous multi-billion dollar backgammon sites like there used to be.
So that's where it's most important to compare what a player is doing to what the solvers are suggesting that a player should do. That is one approach that can also be applied to poker. You can partner, for example, with the makers of solvers. GTO Wizard, for example – we have a partnership with them where we collaborate on this kind of challenge."
"This is one tool in the toolbox, and the rest is really cutting-edge and proprietary. I don't want to talk about it really, but we do have some good tools in the toolbox and some really interesting, high-potential ones on the way as well."
To watch the full interview, head over to Jungleman's YouTube channel. He recently interviewed the founder of another up-and-coming poker room, Phenom Poker, which you can read about below:
Matt Valeo shares insights with Daniel Cates on entrepreneurship, security in online poker, and his new site Phenom Poker, which handles cheating in a unique way.
