Opinion: Enhancing Poker CRM

For online table games, one of the key insights for good CRM is: winning is fun, and losing is not. For online poker, a game with significant luck and skill components, that insight is insufficient to achieve maximum value from CRM efforts.

An obvious example is a new player who loses because of bad luck feels very differently than a new player who loses because of bad decisions. The first player might need a pat on the back, the second a pointer to the PokerStrategy forums.

The flipside of the coin: a new player who wins because he played great feels very differently than a new player who wins because he hit a few miracle cards. The first player will be quite receptive to poker-related offers, whereas the second could have a broad range of possible reactions.

The data bears out the importance of using luck and skill to augment our understanding of the player experience. We examined the first 100 hands for 577,273 players in our data, and produced this staggering comparison of first-time losers: players who played well but lost played 74% more lifetime hands than players who played poorly and lost.

Additional obvious examples are available if we stretch the time horizon: a new player who gets lucky today is very unlikely to stay lucky, leading to the possibility of poorly set ““ and ultimately unmet ““ expectations.

Again, a quick read of the data supports the idea that we need to be thinking about how players experience luck and skill. When we looked at new players who were lucky right out of the gate, they churned at significantly higher rates than new players who had more ho-hum experiences. And it’s not because those lucky players subsequently blew through their found money.

However, although it’s clear that we need to include luck and skill when we think about the player experience, figuring out what to do with the information requires thorough testing.

For example ““ if we see a new player get wildly unlucky, and we think she is at high churn risk, do we commiserate with her bad luck, or do we avoid the subject? Do we offer a generous redeposit bonus, or provide her with something valuable that’s not poker-related? Arguments can be made for and against any number of reasonable treatments, but rigorous empirical work will provide the only meaningful answers.

One place to start is with insights from the world of table games. Namely when a player gets unlucky, reward him in a way that doesn’t remind him of his bad luck; and when a player does well (poker translation: plays well, and wins), use it as an opportunity to put high-margin offers in front of her.

Any way the testing proceeds, one thing is sure: for poker CRM to be considered “solved” the way it is in other gaming sectors, we need to add luck and skill to the way we understand the player experience.