16 May 2016 
Upd: 15 November 2023 
4 min 
489 views What if you want to start a small online gaming project based on quality reliable software, but do not want to invest too much into it? You are not going to do any marketing and attract a massive audience, so the profits will not skyrocket absolutely. How do you get a sustainable technical platform without a constant headache on the return of investment?
What a Poker Club Needs
Let’s say you have a couple of dozens of friends who enjoy playing Texas Hold’em on weekends and the community is growing. Or you are running an offline private poker club with regular tournaments and cash games sessions. Now you want to give it a tech touch – to make an online poker room for these friends or club members.
What would be your minimal requirements for software or technical solution?
- User management. You’ll want to add new members or exclude ones, approve and block users, and check user info.
- Tables and tournaments management to create new events and edit existing, if needed.
- Software/solution stability and reliability.
- Preferable poker games support.
- Good UI.
Every online poker club needs these essential features. If any of them missing, either club management becomes a mess or playing games in this club annoys more than entertains. And we all want to have fun first of all, don’t we?
Compromises and Their Costs
Many private clubs owners refuse to invest money in poker game software at all and tend to choose one of the compromise options:
- Running private tables inside a massive online projects
- Using free and/or open-source poker software
The first option seems the easiest one but it has serious disadvantages. In this case, you don’t really manage and own anything at all. You and your club members may be blocked, tables are closed, money is gone and you cannot do anything about it. Surely, it is not a scalable and reliable solution if you have a group of more than ten players.
Open source software looks like a reasonable choice if you have a person with programming skills in your team (or the skills), but it is only until you count the costs of customization and maintenance. You’ll also need to fix all the bugs and the technical issues by yourself, so the long-term handling of this solution will not be free and easy.
The last popular option, free poker software usually has too strict limitations: you cannot run more than one table or tournament, have more than 100 users, etc. Not to mention software quality issues that become critical problems sometimes. It’s okay for a high school students occasional cash games but no more.
What You Can Sacrifice Easily
Good news: you don’t really need a full package of turnkey online poker software to run a private club. There is a large list of popular options that you may sacrifice without losing any quality or getting gaming experience worse.
The main are the following.
- Payments processing. No need to waste money on payments integration and processing operations. If you have a limited number of users you may manage balance manually. It fits both membership subscription payments and occasional balance refills. In addition, the game will be considered as play money poker so it could be legal nearly anywhere.
- Games you don’t need. If people in your offline club play Hold’em and Open Face Chinese poker it’s not very likely that they would suddenly start to play 7-Card Stud online.
- Marketing tools like rake back, affiliates system, bonuses – you are not going to market your club, so why?
- API integration and any other integration.
EvenBet Solutions for Private and Small Clubs
As for our turnkey software packages, two options suit these requirements:
- Play money solution with client software to customer’s choice. Customizable option to run on a customer’s server. Available as royalty free and rented software.
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Special EvenBet Poker Club solution. Basic multi-table software pack with mild limitations to be launched on our own server. Available with a very small setup fee and a monthly fee for maintenance.
