Down to Business: Poker Training (Part 2)
In Part 1 last week, we covered the Run It Once origin story. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out before continuing here, as I’m picking up right where we left off.
This departure from my usual, more strategy-focused writing, was really well-received by most of you (thank you for the feedback!). For a few, you weren’t interested. If you don’t want to hear me talk about my business journey, you can tune out again and wait a week or two for what you’re used to.
Adjusting to Our Opponents
After learning that we were losing market share, we still weren’t equipped to make all of the right adjustments.
Our entire approach towards business had been product-focused — that was the only lens through which we viewed the competitive landscape. We not only didn’t value marketing highly enough – we wouldn’t have known where to start if we wanted to.
So, instead of focusing on advertising, we did what we’d always done: Review and analyze our product.
We felt we still very clearly delivered the best product, at least from the perspective of subscription memberships, and we figured (incorrectly) that this would take care of itself.
However, we did recognize the value of a different type of product.
Competition: Courses
Besides advertising better than we did, competitors built their businesses more heavily around courses.
The way our team learned poker was through membership sites like RIO, allowing you to get inside the minds of great players and see what they’re thinking as they play. I first learned PLO almost entirely from watching Brian Hastings’ videos on Cardrunners.
This worked pretty well for strong players, but not as well for the rest of the market, many of whom didn’t know where to start when they landed on a site like Run It Once.
Our Elite membership was not structured A-Z, both because of the way we learned, and because of what we could get out of our coaches.
When you’re dealing with high-stakes poker players who came up during the 2003-2010 era (a less studious time), all you can hope for is them submitting their videos less than three months after their due date!
That said, putting ourselves in the shoes of our members, we were able to see the value of a structured course, especially when it came to students who weren’t already experts.
We discovered the leak in our offering, and set out to make courses a larger part of our business.
Diversifying and Adapting
As much of the above was happening, we also began taking on other ventures - entirely new companies offering entirely different products.
Some of these you may know of, some you don’t – but these aren’t the topic of this post.
I bring them up because they led to a structural change in our business.
With the focus of myself and my co-founder, Dan, elsewhere, as we founded these new projects, we promoted James Hudson, a former RIO pro turned employee, to the role of RIO Training’s CEO.
While we made the decision largely out of necessity, it was a great thing for Run It Once – first and foremost because James led these anti-marketing co-founders to begin spending more energy and money on marketing!
In hindsight, it’s incredible that we were able to build the business we did without dedicating anything at all to advertising.
Despite it being one of our biggest mistakes, I’m, in a way, very proud of this.
It means we did a great job with the areas of the company that we focused on and valued: Product, Design, Brand, and how we treated our members and coaches.
A Bit of Luck
With the combination of marketing and paid courses, we had some record years after our sophomore slump.
This was helped in no small way by the blockbuster MTT course PADS on PADS, by Patrick Leonard.
Over the years, we have approached many great, nosebleed-stakes crushers. But in Pads' case, he actually came to us, because of who we were and what we’d built.
We were lucky (and thrilled) that he decided to bring his incredible course to Run It Once, and that he has continued to update it since. The number of hours he’s put into that project blows me away.
Over the years, we dedicated a lot of (too much) time, energy, and money towards all of the things that you could say construct our “brand,” without any clear expectations for how we would see a return on that investment.
Brand isn’t something you can often point to and say, “As you can see here, this has paid dividends.”
But Patrick coming to RIO, followed by us setting company records with his course, was something we could actually pinpoint, with clear and concrete value.
Solve This One, Guys
The advent of solvers literally changed the game, both for playing poker and for learning it.
Some believed that solvers would take the place of training videos, but my belief has always been that they are complementary learning tools.
Still, they’ve been a scare for us at points, and excitement for us at other times.
Solvers (and solver-based tools) are excellent ways to learn, but they are very easy to misuse if you don’t know what you’re doing. The majority of players, in my opinion, don’t know what they’re doing when they learn with these tools.
You need to be able to extract human logic in order to implement your strategies in-game. Memorization doesn’t cut it unless you’re playing 5bb preflop poker.
What’s a great way to learn the human logic applied to solver outputs? Watch a video from a human who’s excellent at it!
There’s another reason videos are important:
They are used by most as passive learning. These viewers watch without taking notes, simply thinking about and absorbing the information.
“But isn’t passive learning a bad thing?”
I’d say yes and no. It depends.
You likely learn less per minute when you’re learning passively than actively, but you have a limit on how much activity your brain can handle.
When I played my challenges, I prioritized performance above all else. I almost never studied with tools on the days that I played.
Instead, I watched videos, made by my friends, specifically for me during challenges.
Studying with tools depleted my brainpower, and I needed all of it that I could hang onto to reach the level of intensity and skill that I wanted to at the tables.
(Anyway, if you were looking for some poker strategy/advice instead of business learnings, I guess some snuck in!)
Competition is Competition
But it didn’t necessarily matter what I thought was best for learning. It mattered what the members thought.
No matter how you slice it, players spending more money to learn from solver-based tools meant they had less money to spend elsewhere, so solver tools take market share, even if players should use both.
My feeling was that this wasn’t a problem, but an opportunity – yes, players would spend less on videos on average, but who says Run It Once has to stick to videos?
Vision
Vision GTO Trainer is a solver-based PLO training tool we offer on Run It Once.
We didn’t build it.
Instead, I found a product that I loved using but wasn’t getting the traction it deserved, and we struck a deal to make it a Run It Once product, leveraging our user base, brand, design and development team, and our newfound ability to market.
It was a great success for all parties involved. The product was already very well designed (imho), and with the help of RIO, word got out quickly.
Vision has done very well. Software like Vision doesn’t carry with it the costs of paying a roster of 60-some poker pros to create content, and the synergies with our existing business were great – especially our heavily overlapping target markets.
After the success of Vision at Run It Once, we set out to find a partner for a No Limit Hold’em Tool.
It turns out that was easier said than done.
Swiping Left
Over the past several years, we’ve been in deal talks with several potential software partners to collaborate on a No Limit Hold’em tool in the same way we did with Vision.
Some of the conversations have been very serious. I won’t go into detail here, but 2-3 of these talks went further than you imagined as you read the above.
In the end, none have yet worked out. We’re still on the market!
Why did many of them fall apart?
Sometimes, we couldn’t come to terms. Other times, as we dug in, the product wasn’t strong enough for us to be confident we could take it the distance.
Part of having a premium brand like Run It Once is that we don’t feel comfortable launching a 4th-best product on the market.
GTOWizard specifically has become so dominant that it makes it very hard to compete. You could say that some partnerships didn’t work specifically because we couldn’t see the path to contending with GTOWizard.
Props to them on building a great product!
Frankly, there’s a good chance we stay out of that market entirely.
While product design has been a strength of ours, we’re not a tech company in the way that some of these tool companies are. We don’t have illusions of whipping up an amazing product on our own in the competitive market environment there is today.
Will the perfect suitor come along? Could we simply become a partner for multiple software products, bundling our videos together with their tools for some win-wins?
Maybe. I don’t know.
For the time being, we’re staying in our lane.
Complexity
My biggest misstep as a founder, in my current opinion, was trying to do too much.
We built a successful poker training site. I thought that meant I was good at business.
What it actually meant was that we built a great product in an area where I had immense expertise, and grew a word-of-mouth userbase in a community that I could (relatively) easily reach.
Could I (and we) have figured out the important elements of running a successful business in any space? Probably.
But could we do that in three new businesses simultaneously while still effectively operating our first, and while I played poker full-time?
No.
This misstep comes from something within me that has always been there and will likely never go away: I love new challenges. I love new ideas. I love building. I love testing the limits of my capabilities.
And, just as importantly, I get bored and unhappy when I’m not challenging myself to grow in that way.
I consider this more of a blessing than a curse. It could even be a superpower.
But I’m still learning to harness it.
In poker, you are always learning and growing (you should be, at least).
You can always be pushing towards that next big milestone.
And it’s fun and exciting! You’re challenging your brain and solving problems every single time you sit down at the table.
In non-poker work, it’s often not quite like that.
Sometimes, the best path is to simply execute something you already know how to do.
No fancy new ideas.
No problem-solving.
Just sit down and do the work.
Find your bread and butter, and keep getting it done.
Frankly, I haven’t yet built up the tolerance for that kind of job, but at least I now recognize and respect the value of it.
In the next and final part, I’ll catch us up to present day and take a look ahead. I’ll share more about my personal leaks as a business owner and where they stem from within me. And I’ll drop a couple of clues about things on the horizon for us.
I hope you’re enjoying the ride. See you next week!
