Interview with Americas Cardroom Manager Phil Nagy
6/30/2006 11:08:13 AM
This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews I will be conducting with online poker room managers. We at Poker Room Review hope this will help to put a human face to the sometimes anonymous world of web poker rooms, and that since the rooms are often a reflection of the manager’s personal style, it will ultimately be useful information.
When talking with Americas Cardroom manager Phil Nagy, it immediately becomes apparent that here is someone who loves what they do. On the subject of poker, he radiates enthusiasm, and his rapid-fire speech carries you along with frequent prompts of...
“Right?” as punctuation at the ends of his sentences.
He is a man of good humor, is very casual, with a quick mind, and a restless, creative energy, who draws on his varied skills in his work, yet if you passed him on the street you would never guess he is the man at the helm of such a complex and successful enterprise. He cultivates this image, and prides himself on being approachable. Phil would fit right in with your friends at the regular Wednesday night home poker game, though he’d probably end up winning most of the pots.
In a recent interview, we talked about his background, the odd business of running an online poker room, and the ineffectual play of the current crop of Bots.
MF: How long have you been in the business, Phil?
PN: A little over 3 years.
MF: How did you get started?
PN: My partner and I were in another business, and we decided we had made entirely too much money and we had lots and lots of money to burn. And we both loved poker, and 4 years ago, online poker was making great waves, and we said, “Let’s look into this.” And that’s how we met BetCRIS, and Americas Cardroom, and how I became a partner here.
MF: What were you doing before?
PN: The way I made my big money? I sold newspapers door to door for a living. Mostly in California and Colorado, and a little bit in New Mexico. Lots and lots of newspapers. Lots and lots of doors. It was a lot of hard work, but fun, in a weird way.
MF: These days, what do you dream of at night: Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, or Clubs?
PN: I dream about heads-up, and final tables, all the time. It’s awful. And I wake up and play poker.
MF: Why should people play at Americas Cardroom?
PN: Because they can talk to me?* We’re a good platform with good software, and more than anything, we have a personal touch. I say in jest players can call and talk to me, but many of our customers can tell you they know our support people by their first names. If they have any questions, we’re pretty on it; we’re as on top of things as you can be. I think that’s the only thing that can set apart one poker room from another. The first thing I do when I go to a new poker room, to check out the competition, or this or that, I try to find their 1-800 number, then I try to get on their live chat, and if it takes me 5 minutes to get on live chat, or if they have no 1-800 number, there’s no way I can deal with them. Cause, you know, I’m not a computer guy. I’ve actually got an assistant who sends e-mails for me. I dictate them and he sends them. I’m a paper and pen, talk to me kind of guy. And when I came aboard, the first thing that I did was, our 800 number had press 1 to go here, press 2 to go here, press 5 to go there.
MF: It makes you crazy.
PN: It makes you crazy, yeah, to go through this web of things to try to get to a live person, so I said get rid of all that and answer the F***ing phone. And if the phone rings more than 3 times, I’m yelling at somebody. The other thing that sets us apart is that we’re backed by BetCRIS, one of the oldest sportsbooks in the world, and people can feel comfortable knowing their money is safe. We’re not going to close up shop and run away.
MF: What’s your typical day like?
PN: Oh gosh. Let’s see.
MF: Is there such a thing as a typical day?
PN: A typical day I come into the office around 11 A.M. First thing I do is check my e-mail see who’s gotten to me, see who hasn’t gotten back to me. I open up the poker software, see what’s going on, make sure that everything’s running smoothly. I check with support and see if there are any issues that they didn’t feel were big enough to call me about the night before, and should it be a slow day I proceed to play poker. If it’s not a slow day, I’m usually going through different ad opportunities, and there’s a bazillion of them, and attempting to come up with creative tournaments. Something to stimulate the players more, to keep it interesting, not the same HO-HO-HOLD-em all the time. One of the things I’m trying to implement, that we’re working on, for lack of a better term we’re calling it a modified Bounty Tournament. Where if the buy-in were 10+1 to make it easy, everybody in the tournament, 5 dollars would go to a regular prize pool, and the other 5 dollars would be a bounty on every single person in the tournament. So you wouldn’t necessarily have to make it in the money to make money in the tournament. How many times have you knocked say 5 or 7 people out, and then go out on the bubble, and end up with nothing? This way, every single person you knock out, you get 5 bucks. Something a little bit different, that nobody else is doing. I sit and try to think of cool things like that and then argue with my programmers that it is possible. Then somewhere in the day I fit in lunch at my desk and most of the time I’m talking to customers, affiliates, people that are calling me, I get somewhere around 200 phone calls a day. I take as many as I possibly can.
MF: You must have serious phone ear.
PN: No, I have a cordless headset. I also have a 14-person phone room that doubles as support should something go down, or whatever. But what these guys do is they . . . how many times have you downloaded something and for one reason or another it didn’t work out exactly the way you wanted it to, and said the hell with it, I’m going somewhere else. We rework all our customers and ask them if they had any problems, any questions, any this or that, and a lot of times we get a lot of people who don’t really understand computers all that well, and they didn’t understand how to disable their firewall, so they just gave up, or this or that or whatever else. We call them up and find out what’s going on, help them in any way we can. I run that, well, I wear a lot of hats. Along with marketing meetings with BetCRIS to help with conversions from sports to poker, poker to sports, to help things go more smoothly. Gosh, there is no typical day. I just do stuff all day.
MF: How do you differ from Calvin Ayre?
PN: Uh, I’m not a multibazillionaire, and if I were, you wouldn’t know I was. If anyone were to come into my office right now, I am probably the only owner in any of these buildings here who come to work in a t-shirt and shorts. Simply because, the people who work with me feel comfortable enough to talk to me, and if they’ve screwed up, they’re not going to some suit sitting in a big leather chair. I want everybody to be able to come to me and talk freely. That’s just who I am. When I made a lot of money in newspapers, it didn’t change me. I wear a 29-dollar watch. That’s just my philosophy in life. I go to a poker conference in an Americas Cardroom t-shirt and jeans and everybody’s looking at me because of how I’m dressed.
MF: How dangerous are ‘Bots’ to the industry?
PN: Okay, assuming that . . . um . . .
MF: Assuming that there are Bots?
PN: No, no, no, I know there’re Bots out there, assuming that you’re talking about limit Holdem I guess, because they have yet to come up with a Bot that can beat a no-limit player. A Bot can calculate the odds better than your average Joe, because it makes the mathematically correct play all the time. I know of a few poker sites that have used Bots, but none of them have found it very profitable. We don’t use Bots. We have it right on our site, “No Robots.” I know there is poker software out there that you can use as Bots, none of which I have found you can use on our particular software. I don’t think Bots will change the industry, because if Bots were to change the industry, the industry would change to prevent them. You have to remember the online gaming industry is probably one of the most innovative industries there are. I mean, between the government restrictions on bringing in money--we’ve gotten around that, we’ve gotten around so many different things, so many obstacles put in front of us, if somebody were to create a winning Bot, our programmers would find some way of detecting it, and eliminating it. I don’t fear any Bot. I’m a poker player. In my mind, if you want to put your money on a Bot, at this point, hey, more power to you, because there’s not a Bot out there that can beat me on a consistent basis.
MF: Which leads me to my next question. Has running a poker room diminished your love of the game? Or has it enhanced it?
PN: No, no, no, it hasn’t diminished my love of the game at all. It’s diminished my bankroll, but I’ll still sit in on a 1-2 table, with the guys. It’s not a matter of the money. It’s for the love of the game. Well, I guess it depends on your bad beats.
MF: Have you ever considered politicians as avatars?
PN: I have. I even considered Barney the dinosaur. I’m still fighting with my programmers that you should be able to buy a unique avatar with your player points. George Bush, Osama bin Laden, whatever. The programmers went bald when I told them about it. But at the same time, you have to keep in mind, the industry we’re in, how much of that type of attention do you want? Do you want that attention directed at you?
MF: If you could change one thing about online poker, what would it be?
PN: I’d win more.
MF: Yeah, me too.
PN: If there was one thing that I could change, it would be that I could find a way to put forth to everyone out there that random number generation is the same as a 52-card deck. That bad beats happen, and good catches happen, and they don’t happen more. No, I take that back. They do happen more online, because of the sheer number of hands. Were looking at a billion and a half hands dealt, how many brick and mortar rooms out there have dealt that many hands? But percentage wise, the hands work out the same.
MF: If you met someone who never played online poker before and you could convey something to them that you felt was really important for them to know, what would that be?
PN: I guess I have a little bit of a different philosophy, and I guess I maybe take it way too far, I don’t feel you have a customer on their first deposit. I don’t feel you have a customer with their second deposit. I feel you have a customer with their first withdrawal. And it’s absolutely true. When you’re looking online and you’re seeing the money changing hands, it may not seem like real money, it looks like a video game. It’s when we send out the first withdrawal to someone, then I don’t ever worry about them, cause I know they’re going to come back.
MF: Yeah, a room can be graded solely by the speed of their cash-outs.
PN: Absolutely. And for a new player, to put your trust out there, and to have that trust honored, well, for me, that’s what it’s all about.
MF: Very good, Phil. Okay, last question. Don’t you think it’s a little arrogant to call yourself Americas Cardroom?
PN: Definitely not. We are the choice of the nation. We are . . . (click) . . . Mike? . . . Hello? . . . Mike? . . .
* Americas Cardroom’s toll free number is 1 888 242-5401, and if Phil is available, he’ll really take your call.