One of the most asked question of private poker game enthusiasts, has always been – “How to Create Poker Club of my own” .
The Poker Agent team is in the poker app market, since it exists ( around 10 years) and currently we own 2 poker clubs of our own and have agency and super agencies in well above 100 clubs.
As you can see, the ratio between owning clubs and offering clubs as agent , is strongly in the favor of the latter. The main reason for this, is that to just create poker club and to run succesfully one, are two completely different things.
Today we will go over all the cost, fees and underwater stones of being a club-owner, in a bid , to make it much easier for you to succeed in your task or give it up earlier and save your time.
To Create Poker Club or Just be Agent ?
For us, the answer lies in our brand name, as we saw the many challenges of owning a club. Let’s go over some obvious Pros and Cons and then delve deeper into the subject:
- Pros of being a Club Owner : If you are an owner of private club, you decide the games, stakes, who is welcome and who is not. You obviously earn more revenue too.
- Cons of being a Club Owner: You are solely responsible of keeping the club active. The player pool is your responsibility. For the club to stay relevant, you have to work tirelessly to provide great games for the players. Another downside are the fees and costs, but more on that later.
- Pros of being an Agent: You bring players to already functional poker clubs with traffic. Offering many spots is much easier as you do not have pressure to invite people, to just one place, in order to keep it running. Ability to provide different platforms for your players.
- Cons of being an Agent: Lesser revenue. Sometimes trickier to get players accepted. More difficult to micro-manage many clubs, instead of just one.
Creating a club takes just few seconds. But maintaining a healthy functional one is a challenging task. Here is what to watch out for:
Which Mistakes to Avoid as a Club-Owner ?
To create a poker club is something, which works out best, if it is combined with solid preparation.
Before starting to promote your poker club, make sure…
- …you already have few poker-playing friends. Most successful private clubs, were just home games, transferred online. The typical friday poker night, was just moved on a mobile device and slowly player pool expanded.
- ….you do not have only strong regular players. There is considerably less fun in poker, when it is played against sharks. No one finds losing money amusing. Having recreational players in your poker club, is a must, in order for players to be happy. A balanced mixture of good and bad players, work out best for you and for them.
- …you take into account the fees and costs for chips and maintaining club level. The best poker apps charge for these things, so make your research, in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later ( below we will give you most of the data you need)
- …to create poker club only on the best poker apps. The ones which have state of the art software, working PC version ( at least with emulator), RNG certificate and even security team, to help you out in monitoring the games. Just as live poker players sometimes select the cardroom just by how cozy it is for them, it is 100x times more important to select the correct online poker room for your audience. Avoid shady unknown poker apps.
How to Create Poker Club ?
Creating a poker club is the simplest part of the whole process. Depending on the platform of your choice, you just click “Create a Club “ from the main lobby, select a name and voilà – you are a “club owner”.
At the start, each club has complementary chips from the poker app it is hosted on. Now you can start inviting players and trading the chips you have with them. Buying more chips from the poker app, happens with diamonds, which are sold on the in-game shop.
In most poker apps, like Pokerbros , Xpoker and PPPoker – club has to be renewed each 30 days. This also costs you diamonds. How much you can find later in this article. Depending on how big is your club, the price varies.
Club Management Tools
As a club owner, you will have the ability to create and shut down tables, monitor data, trade chips with players, ban or restrict people, assign agents and managers, among other things, which help you tailor the experience inside the online poker room.
As unwritten tool for every reputable poker club owner, is to monitor the games inside of his own club. The number 1 thing, which drives away players is if they spot cheating. As a club-owner, it is not enough just to create tables with IP/GPS restriction. This prevents the amateur charlatans in playing as a team on the same table, but there are many other forms of cheating – such as using helping software or collusion, by using VPN. This can easily be spotted by security team, but you cannot only depend on them.
It is best, if two-people co-own a poker club and monitor the games on 12 hour shifts each. If two people, focus on just one club, it will work miraculously well.
How to Join a Union ?
If you create poker club and develop it into an active group with dozens of regular players, the time has come for you to ask yourself – will you continue solo or with partners. In other words, will the club remain a singular private room, or become part of bigger alliance.
To this question, there is no right or wrong answer, as it comes down to the specific scenario. Of couse, if the club is well on its own, you hit the jackpot and do not need any changes. But usually, clubs need an infusion of new players.
The easiest way to boost the ring-games traffic and start offering juicy tournaments is by joining an union. Many club-owners contact us and beg or offer reward, for us to connect them to union-heads. But this is service, which we do not provide.
Finding the right union partner and discussing the terms of joining your club to his union, is something which the club-owner should figure out on his own. All the consequences of his decisions too.
Some of the bigger Unions/Alliances have certain conditions in order to accept clubs – whether it is weekly volume or win/loss ratio. They do not just let anyone in. Another thing which union-heads and club-owners discuss is the size of the deposit/credit line.
Since most of the time, club and union owners do not know each other, the problem with trusting each other with sizable amounts, is obvious. Usually the collaboration between the two parties happens with security deposit and credit line. The size of those, depends largely on the specific scenario and the people involved in the negotiation.
Most of the clubs within unions work with credit line and settle once a week after union security report. Almost every club has also a stop loss and even stop win. If those are hit, the settlement has to happen before the week is over, in order for the club to resume activity.
How to Recruit Players ?
We have been asked this question many times, as well. Someone decide to create poker club and then message us to redirect players to him. Or to post his club to our page.
First and foremost – the clubs we give access to are tested and provided by partners with which we have long history together and huge amount of trust. Some of the clubs are from live-casino owners and others are from popular poker professional players.
If we offer some club, we also take 100% of the responsibility if the club disappears or exit scams.
Since The Poker Agent does this from almost 10 years, solely counting the poker apps – whether you attract friends, acquaintances and other live contacts or you promote online on social media, youtube and twitch – your biggest marketing is being honest and transparent club-owner.
The private poker clubs are thousands, but the legit reputable ones, are just a few dozen and you can find nearly all of them on our website. After spending big amounts on marketing and spreading the word to all our poker-playing professionals our biggest followers came from word-to-mouth advertising. Not by us, but by happy players. As with the fisherman, poker players love to brag about winning sessions, so in this case, this works in our favor too 🙂
So, the best advice for attracting players is try a bit of everything online+offline and keep the players happy by fully guaranteeing the deals yourself and making sure, they play in safe environment. Try to get some poker agents on board for a quick boost, but do not depend only on them. Work tirelessly to perfect your craft – in this case, finding poker players and maintaining a healthy environment in your online poker club.
Costs and Fees
As we mentioned earlier, it is free to create poker club, but it can be expensive to run it. Here are most of the fees and costs you are facing on the most popular platforms.
Creating a PokerBros Club
When you create poker club on Pokerbros and invite a few people to play, you will quickly notice that your initial 10k chips are in need of replenishment. Sadly PokerBros app currently has one of the most expensive chip costs.
While deciding the chip value in your own Pokerbros club , is entirely up to you, buying chips from the app happens at fixated rate.
For easier math, we will test how much chips we can buy with 1300 Diamonds ( exactly 26$ ) , and the answer is 520. This is the least of all poker apps in our list.
Moving on to club level – a requirement for the Pokerbros club to stay active for 30 days. Usually most clubs are fine with Level 2 or even Level 1 the minimal investment, which is also between 1000-1300 Diamonds (20-26$). It is a standard price, nothing outrageous.
There also few other hidden taxes and fees , but they are very minimal to consider them important. The most noteworthy of them all is the tax for weekly reports for agents, which amounts to less than 300 Diamonds (5$) . It is important to note, that you can see all the stats for free, this is only for player-by player sheet on excel. You can still manually check the stats of all players from the in-game panel.
Creating a ClubGG Poker Club
ClubGG has grown exponentially in a short period of time and most people give credit for that, only to their state of the art software on PC/Smartphone and the fact that the platform is backed by GGPoker brand.
While this is true, the key ingredient with which ClubGG Poker app developed so quickly and even completely stole the high stakes action on apps – is the completely free chips for all clubs. When you create poker club on GG, you have unlimited amount of chips. You do not have to buy them from the app, in order for your club to function.
However, ClubGG Clubs have higher maintenance cost – which is 50$ for level 1 club. Luckily level 1 ClubGG Poker clubs are usually big enough for majority of the club owners, since they allow up to 250 Members. The Level 2 clubs allow up to 1000 Members and they cost 100$. Here is the full price list.
Diamonds can be bought directly from the club-owner panel, but if you are player or agent, you may need to send email to the ClubGG Support directly.
As with all other poker apps in this list, club-owners and agents have access to all the weekly and monthly data of their players, but if you need excel looking file, with more detailed information about each player in you can buy these reports with ClubGG Diamonds. For 1 week, the whole club data costs 560 diamond or a little above 5$.
Creating a PPPoker Club
PPPoker is one of the first club-based poker apps and as we have mentioned dozents of times, always looking to provide innovative experience.
Let’s take a look how they set the tone for all the costs and fees. Starting with diamond costs :
As we can see the PPPoker club levels come in many different shape and forms and diamond costs are different, depending on what your goal is. The cheapest club level is for 60 members and costs 1500 Diamonds ( around 25$)
For 100 Members – Level 2 PPPoker clubs cost 2500 diamonds or around 45$ . The bigger clubs are even more expensive so make sure, you take into the account these costs, when calculating your budget.
The PPPoker chips cost varies from time to time, but usually is less expensive than Pokerbros and more than X-Poker. As a nice touch, when you create poker club on PPPoker, you have access to live-chat with their support, in case you need an assistance.
Creating a X-Poker Club
X-Poker platform is very similar to PPPoker a[[ , with less activity overall, but also a slightly more cheaper, when it comes to fees of running a club.
As you can see X-Poker Diamond costs are quite attractive – 300 chips are just 100 Diamonds, which is 1 $ !
Cheapest X-Poker Club Level 1 is just 1200 Diamonds or around 10$. Everything is considerably affordable, so if you are on a tight budget, X-Poker is not a bad option. The app has fully working PC version as well, with functional and pleasing the eye software.
The app has also two major benefits. The first can be seen immediately after you create poker club. On all other poker apps you have the chance to put a description field, but here, they step it up a notch and allow poker club-owners to leave their personal social media and messaging handles. It is easier than ever for players to contact the club-master.
The second advantage is that on X-Poker, Clubs can choose whether the rake is paid in a weighted method, only by the losing player or in something in between.
Finishing Words
There you have, these are all the things you need to know as a beginning club-owner. Now you can go create poker club and invite all your players. May the newfound knowledge bring you lots of success as both poker agent and club host.
If you wish to become poker agent for now, we are the perfect partner for you ( hint, look at the domain name). For the regular grinders we have a bouquet of poker deals, waiting for you to explore them.
For the MTT junkies and lovers of hand chases, rewards , freerolls and everything which associates with the term BONUS, we have a weekly updated page, where we hide the sweet incentives.
