I help people stop drinking alcohol.
I have a podcast.
I have a movement.
I have a training course that’s central to my philosophy.
Earlier this week, someone on this course told me that my work was insular and plagiarised while demanding a refund. At the same time, another person wrote to me concerned that my ‘strong’ personality was getting in the way of my message.
My immediate reaction was to twist.
Change course.
Lower my voice.
And then a third person sent me this:
“You have a unique USP, which I believe will be found to be the most successful way of giving up alcohol known to man.”
I decided to stick.
Human nature as it may be; trying to be all things to all people is as folly as eating soup with chopsticks. We all want universal love and acceptance. And if you keep twisting each time a piece of shrapnel like feedback opens up another wound, you become another cog in this brutal industrialised, zombified system of ours.
Oh god.
How the fuck is Phil Galfond going to create an online poker room?
Phil Galfond: From Player to Instructor to Creator
In the year that Osama Bin Laden finally found out if all that afterlife nonsense was right, an online poker player going by the name OMGClayAiken began competing in the high stakes cash games on Full Tilt Poker. Two years, later and the account peaked at $10.1m, profit.
That Full Tilt Poker account eventually settled at $6.6m, profit before Black Friday pulled the plug.
Galfond has also won $1.4m profit playing on PokerStars as MrSweets28 and close to $3m playing live tournaments including two World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets.
While tearing the high stakes online poker room’s arsehole, Galfond also showed that he was one of the best teachers of poker, after creating content on the online poker training site BlueFirePoker. An internal dispute saw Galfond leave his position, and it’s the best thing that could have happened to him. Galfond created Run It Once an online poker training site many believe to be the best ever produced.
Retire.
Join the theatre; play Tarzan with Farah in the role of Jane.
Hike into the Ugandan mountains and watch Gorillas pleasuring themselves while eating their poo.
Nope.
Not, Phil.
With all of this going on, he decided to stick his reputation inside a Blendtech, after announcing plans to launch the Run It Once online poker room. In the ensuing two years, he has continued to compete at the highest level in the game, create great content for his fans, win a WSOP bracelet, lead a team of online poker developers in a different continent, and even find time to make a baby.
You can’t dress it up any other way.
Phil Galfond is a high stakes rock star.
Run It Once Poker: Coming Soon. Really
Galfond announced plans to launch Run It Once Poker back in August 2016 with a preliminary launch date of Q1, 2017. He never made it. Four months ago, Galfond began sharing further details on the project with his prospective customers in a series of blog posts, and late last week, we received Episode #5 “Phil Plays.”
Unlike the previous four episodes, which were all written, this one is an 18-minute video of Galfond playing for real money on Run It Once Poker in beta mode.
Thanks to his four previous posts we knew that Run It Once Poker would be HUD-free, competitors wouldn’t know who you were, and avatars would display emotions depending on how the game was flowing.
We also knew that the core currency would be euros, you would have your tables selected randomly, and that the launch would arrive in two phases with cash games beginning this summer, and tournaments following sometime later.
More recently, prospective Run It Once Poker players voted to have a six-table cap and for specific designs relating to the table surface, front and back deck design, and tagging colours.
In the video, we get to see the software for the first time, and the first thing that leaps out at you is how similar it looks to Full Tilt Poker (FTP). Given that there has never been software as aesthetically pleasing to the eye, or as responsive to playability than the FTP client, this is a peacock feather in Galfond’s cap.
It looked beautiful.
While playing (folding) Galfond talked through recent developments. There are close to 40 people working in Malta trying to root out and terminate as many bugs as they can find. Even Run It Once ambassadors are getting in on the act.
The Run It Once team have been playing real money games since April in beta mode, and although Galfond believes they have searched and clicked everywhere on the site, they will have to launch without things being 100% tickety-boo.
And on to that launch.
The summer deadline is a miss.
Galfond is non-committal on a fresh start date, for a good reason, but will welcome 1,000 beta testers to start competing on the site for real money on September 13. If you want in, then head to the Run It Once website and sign up for a free account, and become part of the randomised selection process.
Early feedback from beta users has led to Galfond’s team redesigning the avatars to make them bigger. The players felt the tweak was necessary to magnify the emotions and the colour of the players’ shirts (Run It Once doesn’t have a typical colour tagging system, you colour the avatar’s clothing).
There are also plans to change the betting buttons and slider with Galfond stating that it makes him feel calm when he knows the software’s operability is reacting to him.
Galfond also showed you how the ‘Sitting Out’ policy works. When you decide to leave a game, a countdown appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Set for 12-minutes, and it does feel like an eternity when one-tabling, but Galfond points out that when six-tabling, it could take quite a long time to finish all hands, and feels 12-minutes is the right pitch for now.
So Galfond is also twisting but in response from core loyal followers and not a group of disbelievers. Galfond and his team at Run It Once have decided that if they are going to be in this race, they want a horse that’s like no other, and after reading all of his blog posts, understanding the mission and values of the company, and now seeing the gameplay in action, I have a feeling Run It Once Poker is going to be unique.