INDUSTRY INSIDER: MARK MCGUINNESS
Free-to-play is no longer a marketing
curiosity. It is the only environment in which online poker can be reintroduced to a generation that never met it. The funnel begins there or it does not begin at all
player still loses, just without knowing who beat them. Software restriction is necessary but reactive. Every restriction triggers a workaround, and the workaround business is too lucrative for the contest to end on operators’ terms.
Only the third response is durable: segmentation. Recreational liquidity held in its own pool. Formats designed to reward decision-making over endurance. Game design that prioritises the player who came for the night out, not the player who came with a spreadsheet. This requires the courage to break with twenty years of “all liquidity is good liquidity” orthodoxy. Very few operators have shown it.
THE LIVE GAME PROOF POINT Live poker, meanwhile, is enjoying its strongest cycle in 15 years. The World Series of Poker Main Event has broken attendance records repeatedly since the pandemic. Regional tours across Europe and Latin America run at capacity. The live game thrives while the online game stagnates. The reason is simple. At a physical table the solver does not sit beside you. The amateur poker player retains genuine equity in the entertainment, not just in the prize pool. Live poker has remained a game. Online poker, in too many environments, has become a profession.
THE MATHS OF POKER PLAYER ECOLOGY
The calculation for the boardroom is unforgiving. A casual player at the £25 buy-in level may deposit twice a year, lose modestly, enjoy the night, and tell three friends. A professional grinder at the same stake plays a hundred thousand hands a month, extracts rake-equivalent value from the pool, and tells nobody. One funds the network. The other harvests it.
Operators spent twenty years optimising for the wrong metric. Hands dealt and rake collected sat at the top of every dashboard. Player diversity, recreational retention, and deposit longevity sat nowhere visible. The cumulative result is a pool top-heavy with predators and structurally short of prey.
WHAT THE INDUSTRY HAS TRIED There have been three serious responses, and none of them are complete. Anonymity strips screen names from tables; well-intended, but it cannot strip skill differentials. The casual
THE FREE-TO-PLAY MODEL Free-to-play poker platforms now occupy a position the real-money networks cannot easily reach. With no rake to extract and no bankroll to defend, F2P can rebuild what the real-money rooms have lost: the social texture of the game, the room for theatre, the permission to be reckless. The next generation of players will learn poker on a phone, in a brief window, against a digital croupier and a circle of friends. They will not learn it on a low-stakes table monitored by a syndicate of grinders.
The Devilfish Free-to-play poker platform, ethos belongs in that environment. Dave Ulliott played the man, not the cards, and he
About the author
Mark McGuinness is an ‘architect of high-impact iGaming marketing.’ He is currently fractional CMO at
Devilfish.com and brings over 24 years of elite digital marketing leadership to the role, advising top-tier iGaming operators across diverse regulated landscapes. He translates deep analytical power, honed from his scientific background, into breakthrough strategies for affiliate marketing, Web3, social poker, and casino gaming. McGuinness champions the game-changing integration of neuroscience and behavioural economics to skyrocket customer engagement and conversion.
made the game look like fun. That sensibility cannot be reverse-engineered into a real- money network already optimised for grinder retention. It can, however, be designed into an F2P product from day one and funnelled outward into the wider ecosystem.
POKER AS FUNNEL, NOT PRODUCT
The smartest operators have stopped treating poker as a product question and started treating it as a funnel question. F2P teaches the game. Live tournaments deliver the experience. Real-money platforms exist to capture the player who graduates from one to the other. Poker’s value to a multi-vertical operator was never the rake line. It was always the lifetime engagement of the player who learned to love the game on a free platform and now bets the football on Sunday. That reframing changes the P&L conversation. Poker is not a marginal vertical to be defended on a standalone GGR sheet. It is a powerful acquisition surface that feeds casino and sportsbook revenue for years. The CFO who measures poker on standalone GGR misses the point. The CMO who measures it on cohort progression understands the next decade.
THE POKER RESHUFFLE The next operator to crack online poker will not do it by squeezing the existing pool harder. The grinder economy is sustainable only at the lowest stakes, and even at those stakes the mechanisation is accelerating. The future is hybrid, social, and
unapologetically entertainment-led. It accepts that the solver era has changed the meaning of online poker itself. It rebuilds the recreational journey from a free phone game to a live final table, with real-money play sitting in the middle as the engaging escalation rather than the entire proposition. The poker deck is being reshuffled. The operators with the courage to redesign rather than defend will deal the next decade. The rest will continue to manage a beautifully optimised decline.
GIO MAY 2026 29
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