Nevada-based free-to-play poker and casino sites, acePLAYPoker.com and acePLAYCasino.com, have announced that they will be closing in less than a month. Yes, there were play money gambling sites in Nevada unrelated to WSOP.com.
In a blog post, the farewell message was penned:
Microsoft has announced Word Series of Poker: Full House Pro, a free-to-play poker game for Xbox 360 and Windows 8. This new title is a follow on to the Xbox Live Arcade title Full House Poker, adding new game modes, real world casinos, and the ability to resume play on either Xbox 360 or Windows 8. Lady GaGa Poker Face Tutorial Being a HUGE fan of Lady GaGa, I’ve gotten hundreds of request to replicate her eye makeup in Poker. Ninja fight at school. On Wednesday, PokerFuse broke the news that former Victory Poker CEO and Who’s Your Daddy, Inc. Owner Dan Fleyshman will be taking the reins as CEO of Ivey Poker. This, less than two weeks after Phil Ivey announced on Twitter that Ivey Poker will temporarily suspend its free-to-play (F2P) Facebook application.
It is with a heavy heart we are announcing that acePLAY Casino will be shutting down Wednesday November 22nd. Our parent company was recently acquired, but unfortunately we will not be coming along for the ride. We have sincerely appreciated our loyal players over the past 2 years and you will be greatly missed. We thank you for your support.
I know nobody reading this has ever heard of acePLAY, but believe it or not, I wrote an article about it over four and a half years ago! I thought to myself, “Hmm…that site sounds familiar, I wonder if I ever wrote anything about it?”
Sure enough, when I did a search on a little backend page for the site, acePlay popped up!
In February 2013, Bally Technologies — the first company to receive an online gaming license in Nevada, by the way (win a bar bet with that one!) — inked a deal with Amaya Gaming (now The Stars Group) to use the Ongame poker platform as well as its casino games for a new online gaming offering.
A few months earlier, Bally’s agreed to provide American Casino and Entertainment Properties, LLC (ACEP) with an online poker platform. ACEP owns the Stratosphere casino in Las Vegas, Arizona Charlie’s Decatur, Arizona Charlie’s Boulder, and the Aquarius Casino Resort and is now itself owned by Golden Entertainment. That online poker product was called acePLAY (GET IT?) and launched for play money only the same week Bally made the Ongame deal.
I honestly don’t know if ACEP ever intended to eventually offer real money poker, but acePLAY did offer Stratosphere-related prizes. Though it was just play money, it was clearly meant to be a way to market ACEP’s properties.
But despite Nevada being the gambling capital of the U.S. (and the world, really) as well as the first state to legalize online poker, online poker has not been very successful there at all. A lot of that has to do with the simple fact that the state is not heavily populated, though hopefully things will improve once New Jersey’s player pool is combined with Nevada’s and Delaware’s. The other problem is likely that Nevada only legalized online poker, not online casino games, as well. Casino games are much more accessible to the average gambler or potential gambler and can eventually be used as a way to players involved in poker. New Jersey, for example, hasn’t seen online poker be this gigantic boon that regulators expected it to be, but online casinos have thrived.
Now, acePLAY wasn’t for real money, but if you’re going to try to bring in a crowd for fake money poker and casino games, you need a good hook, and using the old Ongame software is not the best way to start. There are plenty of free games that offer no “real life” rewards that draw large player numbers — say, Zynga Poker — but they have a huge built-in player base on social media and offer all sorts of silly free social goodies that players lap up.
On Wednesday, PokerFuse broke the news that former Victory Poker CEO and Who’s Your Daddy, Inc. owner Dan Fleyshman will be taking the reins as CEO of Ivey Poker.
This, less than two weeks after Phil Ivey announced on Twitter that Ivey Poker will temporarily suspend its free-to-play (F2P) Facebook application. The poker app shuttered its door on Saturday, October 25th, as scheduled.
All was not doom and gloom, however, as Ivey stated that the closure of Ivey Poker is “the first step in our evolution as we prepare to launch an even bigger and better gaming experience for you all in 2015.”
It is likely that Fleyshman ordered the closure of Ivey Poker as part of a broader re-imagining process that will see both Ivey Poker and poker training site Ivey League receive a complete makeover, although Fleyshman was not available to confirm.
A brief history of Ivey Poker
Ivey Poker debuted on Facebook in July 2013. Although the market was already saturated with F2P poker apps, Ivey Poker attempted to differentiate itself by integrating a spectrum of training videos and through its stable of Ivey Poker Pros, of which there were many.
Of course the brand association with arguably the most recognizable name in poker certainly didn’t hurt either.
Ivey Poker followed up with a poker training site entitled Ivey League in 2014. But whereas the training site managed to find a niche among the myriad of like-minded services on the Internet, Ivey Poker was unable to compete against established names within the social poker space such as PokerStars and Zynga — which leads us back to the present.
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Who is Dan Fleyshman?
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The self proclaimed “youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history,” Fleyshman began his entrepreneurial career within the apparel industry. His Who’s Your Daddy brand would later branch out into the energy beverage market, where it would find marketed success.
By 2009, Dan embarked on a new venture, this time within the burgeoning online poker arena. He became the CEO of Victory Poker in 2010. The site quickly established itself among online poker’s giants, largely thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign and its lineup of “Team Victory” pros that included big names such as Antonio Esfandiari, Jonathan Little and Paul Wasicka.
That success was to be short-lived however, as days after Black Friday, Fleyshman opted to block US customers from playing for real-money. Shortly after, Fleyshman voluntarily shut down Victory Poker, and migrated its existing members over to Cake Poker.
To this day VictoryCEO.com remains online, but it exists now as Fleyshman’s biography page.
Fleyshman has also established himself as a formidable poker player, racking up more than $700,000 in live tournament winnings over the course of the past years.
Expectations for the new Ivey Poker
At the ripe old age 33, Fleyshman already has 15 years experience building brands from the ground up. His creativity, aggressiveness style of doing business and media-friendliness will likely prove invaluable assets to the Ivey Poker brand.
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How he intends to approach the relaunch is anyone’s guess. But if there’s one thing that’s a near inevitability, it’s this: the new Ivey Poker and Ivey League will be light years ahead of the old in terms of innovation and design.
