As of this Sunday night, I will officially be out of the day-to-day poker business world for the first time in about six years. I will still have some minority equity positions related to poker but that’s it. I co-founded thepokerdb in May 2005 (over six years ago!) and I co-founded PSCrew.com even before that — around January 2005. So not working on anything poker-related starting in August will be quite a change given that roughly 85% of my professional life has been poker-related. Although, I have to admit, it’s a change I’m really looking forward to. This is something that was decided back in early June and I’ve been wrapping up various poker commitments since that point.

The US Gov’t war on online poker has really taken it’s toll. Of course it’s taken its toll on the sites, the players, the whole industry. But I am talking about myself here (given that it’s my blog). I just have such a different mindset about online poker these days than I did in the 05-08 timeframe. The last two plus years have been a major struggle mentally. It seemed like the whole industry was always just waiting and expecting things to fall apart in the US. And now, of course, they have. And it’s a brutal reality now for people in the US-related poker world without other options. Players don’t know what to do. Poker-related businesses are down significantly. But for me, more so than anything, I just can’t stand being on edge all the time about the industry that I work in. In the last few years, there were like 20 pieces of major bad news and 0 pieces of major good news. That’s a rough combo.

So, as stated above, I’m moving on. I won’t rule out a return to poker at some point should the right opportunity present itself but I’m virtually certain I won’t return until the legal environment changes (if it changes). I am personally pretty pessimistic about it changing soon which is one reason that I’m not waiting it out and developing new things related to poker. There are a lot of opportunities out there online so I’m going to apply my web marketing skills to some industries that aren’t under constant attack.

What’s next? I can’t say the exact projects yet but I’m working on things roughly related to the CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting areas. These are both subjects that I’m passionate about (although I’m more passionate about Oly, I do really enjoy a number of aspects of CrossFit). I also own grocerystores.com and foodstores.com so at some point I hope to be able to develop those sites (the current sites are placeholders, not at all what a finished product would look like) at some point in the future — as well as about a dozen other quality domains that I own. I’m also going to be working for the rest of the year (and possibly beyond) on things related to WordPress and WordPress themes. WordPress and programming are long-time passions of mine (I switched my blog over to WordPress slightly over four years ago and I haven’t looked back) so I’m pretty pumped about that.

To those of you in the online poker community who’ve been friendly and welcoming over the years (almost all of you), thanks for the great experience. I really hope things get on track for online poker in the US. Best of luck to everyone! Keep in touch.

That’s a screenshot from eBay of the two auctions. For obvious reasons I blurred out the account names of the winners. It will be up to them if they want to reveal themselves at some point.

I’m happy with the PND sales price. We had a pre-auction offer for a little bit more but I think we all preferred to let it go to auction and see what happened. At least this way we can go to sleep at night knowing that we put it out in the market and let the market decide what to pay.

The PT sales price is a little lower than I think it’s really worth but I guess it’s only worth what people will pay for it. I was tempted to bid for it myself and buy it personally but in the end I decided against it.

The reason I didn’t bid on PT is because I really just kind of want to take some time off from the whole poker affiliate thing. I may be getting back involved in a poker project (in early discussions now) but it won’t be an affiliate project. I’m also reworking an affiliate site of ours but I won’t be doing that much related to poker affiliating after the next few months (unless something changes).

Good luck to the new owners of PND and PT!

As an FYI to anyone out there who works in the poker industry, the company that I work for has decided to sell two of its websites on eBay. Both sites were put up around noon PST today and they’re going to be 10 day auctions.

The first one is the site known as PokerNewsDaily. PND is a widely read poker news source with very solid Google rankings and traffic numbers. Here’s a link to the PND auction. The second site is PokerTerms, which I have posted about previously on this blog here and here. Here’s the PokerTerms auction link. We’ve enjoyed running both sites but we feel like they both deserve more attention than anyone at our company can currently give to them. We started both auctions at 1 cent and we’re running them without a reserve. And since both of them have received bids so far, basically, someone else is going to own the sites in about 10 days!

It should be really interesting to see how the auctions go. The business of buying and selling websites (particularly poker sites, which exist in a highly profitable but also volatile industry) is a very coy cat-and-mouse game when done via private channels. We were actually close to closing a deal to sell PND earlier this year but after months of negotiation, some plane trips and an agreement in principle, the other party decided against it. We’ve had that happen to us multiple times in various situations (not necessarily related to PND though) over the last few years and I think it’s fair to say that we’re more than fed up with dealing with private sales, protracted legal discussions, extensive documentation and due diligence, etc. These are pretty small/simple sites in the grand scheme of things and they just don’t require that sort of process. I don’t think any of us really care what the sites go for as we just want to focus on the part of the business that we’re better at running and not have the distractions of running sites that are really ancillary to our core business. That’s not to say they can’t be highly profitable sites to run though — they both can. Just not in our company with our current business needs and current workforce skills/availability. Hopefully eBay will cut through the bullshit and just get the sites sold for a somewhat fair market value price.

Good luck to anyone who decides to bid, you’ll be getting a great asset if you do.