ThePokerCoop

The "Idea," continued from yesterday.  I think people care more about what can be done with providing liquidity, so I’ll talk about that first, and I’ll talk about the poker site insurance second.  This one is probably going to have to be a two-parter.

This Cooperative is basically the parable of the sticks – in a nutshell, a bundle of sticks is stronger than each of the sticks individually.  How does this parable apply to you and the Co-Op?

* It takes US players 5 weeks to cash out.  It takes international players 3 days to cash out.  It takes 1 day for an international player to send money to the US.  In finance, we call this an arbitrage opportunity.  It’s just easy vig for one of our foreign members to do an “occasional” transfer with a US player.  Everyone’s happy.

* Several skins have faster bank wires, but those usually have five figure minimums.  It’s kind of retarded for a bunch of people to each wait 5 weeks for check if a wire can be done faster.  Some sites allow the Affiliate to get paid by bank wire.  Hmm…

* If you have two accounts (and some networks like Merge allow accounts on multiple skins), you can cash out twice as fast.  It sure would be nice if you could find a “buddy” who could transfer you some money to a secondary site.  Or maybe a whole network of buddies...

* Poker is a game of skill, but it does have some volatility. Some members are going to be on an upswing and others are going to be doomswitched.  Rather than taxing the already-stressed deposit and withdrawal system of the US poker sites, we can trade amongst ourselves to even out those peaks and valleys.  That's a win for everyone - including the poker sites.  And in the big scheme of things, this should help sites process cashouts quicker overall.

* People probably leave more money online than they need to because they don’t want the hassle of having to redeposit.  Well, what if redepositing was as easy as sending the Co-op members an email and receiving the funds in as little as an hour? (12 hours at the most)  And you would pick up some VIG.  Ka-ching!

The sites don’t want us to get too "crazy" with the transfers, but they won’t mind one here and one there.  So we'll have to tone it down a little from what I was originally planning, but the framework is still very workable.  All of the above already goes on in the 2+2 player to player transfer thread (directly or indirectly), so it’s not like I’m making up anything that’s revolutionary – I’m just packaging it in a sexier and more convenient form.

But you might be saying to yourself, “why would this be different from the 2+2 transfer thread where most trades never happen and even when it does it sometimes takes days?  And how do I know I won't get scammed?”

Once this is going strong, all trades will happen and you won't get scammed - because *I’M* holding the sticks together and you have the strength of the Co-Op.  (To be continued)

Send an email to me at doubleflypoker@gmail.com if you're interested.  I probably need a minimum number of people interested, otherwise we'll go with Plan B.