Why I’ll Be Playing On Phenom Poker (And Maybe You Should Too)
Written by: Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace. If you’d like to read more articles like this, go to patreon.com/checkitdown
I have good news for RecPoker. I’ll be making a bunch of new content over the coming weeks. When the WSOP starts I’ll slow down to an occasional article, but after it ends I’ll be back making content again. I am planning to play a ton of poker during the series because I took enough time to really enjoy playing poker again.
To that end I really want to hear what kind of content you want to see from me. I can cover almost anything after doing hundreds of seminars on all kinds of topics and working with hundreds of students over the years, so check the forums for a post where I’ll be asking for content requests.
In this first article, I want to talk about a new poker site that will be launching soon called Phenom Poker. This isn’t a puff piece where I just tell you that it will be super fun and post a sign up link. That’s not who I am. And I know too many pros who have been burned by throwing their support behind a site that didn’t treat players well. I don’t want to be that guy, and I don’t endorse anything I don’t believe in.
I was badly burned by Full Tilt. That shut down cost me a lot more than having to wait a few years for my bankroll. A lot more. And I’ve been hired by sites that I later had to leave after seeing that things weren’t on the straight and narrow. I was even kicked off a pro team once for bringing up some very questionable business practices in the group chat with the other pros. That site shut down a month later and it was a fight to make sure players got their money, but it did happen.
So I’m suspicious of anyone who tells me about a new poker site. But I heard about this one from Frank Gamble, who seems like a solid guy, and after talking to them I am tentatively impressed. I say tentatively because their software isn’t ready for beta testing yet, though they expect that to happen very soon.
The first good sign was their roster of endorsers. When I saw Brian Rast and Ari Engel on the front page, I figured they couldn’t be too bad. The presence of these two trusted names, among others on their pro team, tells me that at least the poker players involved in running the site are not shady. Engel and Rast know everyone and if Gamble and his fellow owners had a bad reputation, those two would want nothing to do with it.
The presence of two trusted pros on the pro team doesn’t guarantee anything, but they aren’t the kind of guys who say yes to whatever endorsement deal comes around. In fact I don’t if either of them has endorsed anything before.
I was initially concerned that the site (sort of ) involves crypto currency. USDT is a crypto currency that is pegged to the US dollar. Then Gamble explained that the site doesn’t hold the currency, you hold it yourself and buy in to their tables just like you would at a live card room. When you are done playing, you cash out and the crypto goes back to your crypto wallet.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how a crypto wallet works, it is a digital wallet that only someone with the passphrase can open. Much like money in your pocket, the crypto in your crypto wallet is yours and no one else can spend it. It is a brilliant way to handle the problem that plagues most poker sites these days. No one wants to trust them to hold onto money.
The second interesting part is that they are using USDT. This currency doesn’t work like bitcoin with speculators and naysayers causing wild swings in pricing. In the graph above you can see the price graph of USDT since it’s inception in 2017. There were some swings at the beginning, from $.90 to $1.10, but it has been pretty smooth since, and you generally know what it’s going to be worth.
This is a great way to use crypto without all the price swings that most people associate with bitcoin. It doesn’t make the currency perfectly safe, so I won’t be holding a huge amount of USDT in my crypto wallet, but it seems safe enough for me to toss a little poker money so I can play. There has been a pegged currency that plummeted to near zero, a coin called TerraUSD, which is a long story about bad management and bad timing, but it could happen to other stablecoins some day. So far though, for more than six years, other stablecoins that are pegged to the US dollar have been, as their name implies, stable.
When considering any new business venture I consider the possibility of loss, but also the possibility of profit. Just like a poker hand. I think the chance of a big loss here is very low, but it isn’t zero so I don’t want you to dump your whole bankroll into USDT and then burn my house down if something goes sideways.
The biggest thing that drove me to tell people about Phenom was the fear of missing out. I was worried that ACR would crash and burn for years while my friends made good money on the site and got paid. They are still paying people all these years later and I would have made a lot more money if I had gotten serious about playing on the site when I first learned about them.
I think Phenom has the chance to do something great. I don’t know if they will, and we’ll talk about their biggest obstacle next, but I don’t want to miss the boat on this one. When sites first launch they are as soft as they will ever be, and when I tell you about the deal I worked out with them you’ll see yet another reason why the first sixty days might be really profitable.
I think the biggest obstacle they have to overcome is the US government. They maintain that the site is completely legal because the UIGEA only relates to banking, which appears to me to be true, but I’m not a lawyer. The problem is the Department of Justice often doesn’t really care what the law is. In fact, they can basically make it up as they go, something they do often. If the DoJ decides to go after someone, whether their business is actually legal or not, it’s trouble.
So what happens if the DoJ decides to shut down Phenom and they put serious resources behind it? I don’t think they will, they still aren’t doing much of anything about sites like ACR and have yet to bother the owners of apps like Kings Club or Poker Bros, but it is still a possibility.
What probably happens in that instance is that the DoJ seizes assets the site has to fight in court to get back and they cripple the company. This is one of their strongest weapons. They win because the business is ruined, even if they were wrong and have to give the money back and apologize or pay a settlement.
The good news is that if this happens to Phenom some day, your money won’t be on the site. It will be in your crypto wallet where the DoJ will have no interest in it and couldn’t get it if they wanted to. They can’t seize it because it isn’t the site’s money and they have no control over it. So, while you no longer have a poker site to play on, you don’t lose your cash. It lowers the risk level drastically to make it work this way. Kudos to Gamble and his pals for setting it up this way.
The big upside is the way that Phenom runs their rakeback program. I’ve heard it described as partially player owned, but that really isn’t accurate. Phenom has created fifty million tokens that each represent a piece of the site’s income. If you own a single token, you are entitled to one one-hundred-millionth of the site’s revenue, paid weekly.
Rakeback on the site will be paid in tokens. Once a player has these tokens, they can hold on to them and get paid every week, or they can sell them back to the site. The set price for the first four weeks will be $0.50 per token, so you can sell them back at that price if you like. But you can also hold on to them and not only get paid, but hope they go up in value and you can sell them back at a higher price later.
The pricing for the site buying back the tokens will 130 / 50,000,000 * the four week rolling revenue of the site. So if the site makes a million dollars in rake the first month, you can sell your tokens back for $2.60 each. Since a million dollars isn’t a lot for an online poker site to rake in a month, I’ll definitely be holding on to my tokens. It’s a gamble, but I think it’s a good one.
The tokens can not be sold any other way. This is because the site doesn’t want their tokens to become a kind of crypto currency that is speculated on the open market. This causes massive swings and invites suspicious activity. The tokens are only between you and the site and they are only used to represent your share of the revenue.
So when you get paid rakeback, you can turn it into cash right away, or wait and see how much it turns into later while getting paid your share of the site’s rake. It’s a pretty impressive reward system to be honest.
In other great news, many of the owner’s on the poker side are mixed game players, and I have been promised there will be more than two dozen mixed games available. This is what many of us have been waiting for. Finally a poker site with Razzdugi!
I was also impressed with something Gamble said when we first talked about the site. I paraphrase here, but basically “I have a business degree, but I’m a poker player. We brought in real business people to handle the business stuff.” And they did, with a whole crew of business minded people who have taken other companies to sizable valuations and have good reputations. This certainly would have changed things at Full Tilt.
Another fear with online poker is cheating. It’s a very reasonable fear these days with Real Time Assistance (RTA) and solvers popping up consistently on so many poker sites. The Terms and Conditions you sign when you join Phenom will allow them to post your real name on the list of banned players if they catch you cheating, something most other sites have rarely had the guts to do. They assure me that they are serious about security, and I’ll report back after playing on the beta site soon.
Now the kicker. If you sign up through my link and generate just $100 in rake in the first sixty days, you’ll get 100 tokens free. That’s a minimum of $50, and probably quite a bit more. And that is on top of the rakeback you’ll already be getting. I’m pretty sure they’ll never run this deal again, it’s too generous and once a site is established they don’t need to run crazy promos like this.
Now I can’t guarantee anything about the site. I know what I see, and the people I’ve talked to, but I don’t have access to the inner workings of the site. I’m not even an endorser, let alone a part of the business. It looks like a fantastic gamble to me, so I’m taking it, and I recommend that you do the same. If we all get burned I will buy each and every player who signed up through my link a drink the next time I see in Vegas. But if I thought that was likely I wouldn’t even be talking about them. And I don’t think Ari Engel or Brian Rast would be either.
You can click on my link HERE, or type PhenomFox.com into your browser to go to the early sign up link so they will notify you when the site goes live and that sixty day clock starts ticking. If you use that link, you’ll be eligible for the 100 free tokens deal.
I’ll see you all on the forums and in a few weeks I imagine I’ll start seeing a bunch of you in Vegas. Oh, and if the site goes as well as I think it will, you have to buy me a drink after you cash out a nice bonus from your tokens.
If you’d like to read more articles like this, go to patreon.com/checkitdown, where Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace writes every week or read previous articles Fox has written for RecPoker here:
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