Kick-Off was the best (strategic) poker product of the past decade.

In a technical sense, Kick-Off is nothing revolutionary. A steps tournament with a non-tabular lobby and some slightly more advanced (for a poker site) graphics. It is the child of a poker player who grew up through the console wars. It could be much, much more, but Stars is a division which makes money from a certain type of customer and the cake has to fit in a certain box; the last contestant on a Simon Cowell talent show is an uplifting/unexpected redemption story for a reason.

Looking at it as a marketing play, it is a tap in, albeit an interesting one for those of us with marketing backgrounds. “Neymar Jr is shaking up poker!” shout the adverts, except he isn’t, he’s just the latest in a long time of celebrity ambassadors, trading their access to their brand/audience for a fee. Again, this is nothing novel - poker companies have mined that sort of seam for a long time, although the golden period when you could sign up a Moneymaker or Hachem, pretend anyone could match their success and sit back and count the revenue is long gone. If anything, after the low hanging fruit was harvested, partnership marketing ended up matching the muddled product approach, mixing sport (Ronaldo. Other Ronaldo. Mats Sundin) with celebrity (Jason Alexander). Maybe George Costanza could provide a coherent explanation? It’s not a like for like comparison, but Bet365 had Ray Winston, or a local market equivalent, and the consistent simplicity of their approach and advertising is a sharp contrast.

This may read as a criticism of the poker/product/marketing teams at Stars, but it’s not intended to be - if there is a thematic thread here it is that, Dead Sea effect aside, there is earnest talent in the employee base, but that they are working within a set of (perceived) axiomatic boundaries. This is limiting in multiple dimensions, although it’s unlikely they perceive the constraints as a frustration.

Ultimately the core reason why Kick-Off fails to reach its potential is that it is a poker product rather than a Neymar Jr product. Many customers will come to the product for Neymar Jr, but then their journey will be determined by the clunky interaction of CRM up/cross sell, organisation chart structured product design and the core poker game experience (which you don’t control). This setup undoubtedly works for some acquisitions. It also underpins a (not insignificant) number of employee roles, as well as a lot of meetings, discussions and the sort of strategic opportunity content that fits nicely with quarterly reports.

Kick-Off is a vertical. The core pathway aims to move people up through a (poker) revenue structure, with secondary or asynchronous (mainly email) branching for other verticals. A horizontal is different because multiple outcomes are built into the product design. You can’t just tweak a product like Kick-Off to achieve this.. You ship your org chart, and a horizontal, where the boundaries between products and marketing become much less uniform, necessitates a different organisational approach and structure. It also needs a technology platform that’s far more adaptable and responsive than what’s common in the industry.

Unrational Games shares a great deal of corporate DNA with Scheinberg-era Stars, but we are not a poker company, and unpoker is not a poker product - it was conceived (long before Kick-Off, The Grand Tour and even Power Up) to reject many of the established structures, specifically so we could optimize for a horizontal model and move faster, targeting focused markets that traditional clients can’t easily reach.