Ultimate Poker’s Tom Kobrin Hoping To Take Company To New Level

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Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 | Written by Lucy Brown

Ultimate Poker’s new chief marketing officer, Tom Kobrin, has been addressing some of the performance concerns leveled against the USA’s first regulated online poker website, and his message is clear; unlike its competitors, Ultimate Gaming should gain extra respect for being the country’s only all America operation, and that big plans are currently afoot designed to take the company to a whole new level.

The story so far

After a positive start in Nevada in which the company enjoyed a monopoly on the state’s nascent online poker market, Ultimate Poker was joined by WSOP.com towards the end of 2013, after which the site saw its traffic plummet from 220 cash game players over a seven-day period to just 55 players last week, according to PokerScout.

The situation is even more drastic in New Jersey, where Ultimate Poker has to compete in a saturated iGaming market and is currently showing zero cash players, rising to just 29 players during peak times.

A number of reasons have subsequently been given for the company’s poor performance so far, with the list including geo-location and payment processing problems, as well as unappealing software and uninspired promotional campaigns compared to its competitors.

Made in America

In an interview conducted with CardsChat, Tom Kobrin, was keen to emphasize Ultimate Gaming, a subsidiary of Station Casinos which owns UltimatePoker.com, is the only all-American company operating in the country’s two main online poker markets of Nevada and New Jersey. That includes everything from its software to its employees. In addition, Tom Kobrin points out that Ultimate Gaming has had to build up its business from zero as the company “didn’t have the advantage of partnering with a Borgata or WSOP that had very well-known, trusted, land-based platforms with huge databases of poker players.”

Terrence Chan’s departure

When Terrence Chan decided to leave the company, his departure was particularly hard felt as the former Director of Player Operations in Nevada and New Jersey had worked tirelessly to ensure excellent customer service, and was often seen on players forums encouraging open communication between Ultimate Gaming and its players.

Fortunately, his successor Ali Hajjafar was hand picked by Chan to replace him and after a readjustment period “Ultimate Ali”, as he is now known, has followed in Chan’s footsteps by becoming an active member of the 2+2 forums, and by dealing with complaints in a timely fashion. As Ali Hajjafar explains in the cardschat interview:

“He felt that I would continue his vision. We take pride in how quickly player issues are addressed, answering emails in under 20 minutes and handling most issues quickly by live chat or phone. We are IT people and poker experts, and it shows in our ability to handle player problems and questions.”

Exodus of team pros from site

While a handful of Ultimate Poker team pros continue to represent the site, including Antonio Esfandiari, Jason Somerville, Dan O’Brien, and Danielle Andersen, recently the company cut its roster of sponsored pros in half with none of the exiting pros offering any explanation as to their departure. When pressed on the topic, Tom Kobrin, has now explained the decision to release the pros as part of an overall cost cutting process, and as he further elaborates:

“The online gaming market had projections of $500 million a year in revenue for New Jersey and $80 million a year in Nevada. The real numbers were far from that. Ultimate put together a whole marketing strategy based on the projected numbers given to them, but as the year went by, the numbers came in and weren’t close. The original strategy put in place was for a much bigger market.”

Big plans ahead

Looking further ahead, Kobrin expressed optimism the company will successfully start attracting greater numbers of new players to its site and thus carve out a bigger slice of the growing iGaming pie for itself. Amongst the numerous promotions mentioned is the Ultimate Poker Live series currently taking place at Station Casinos across Las Vegas and attended by a number of its Team U pros, as well as an upcoming promotion in downtown Las Vegas where players will compete in the live arena but while using their laptop computers.

Other promotional endeavors include this months 100% reload bonus which will run until September 12th, and a special “Sports Connection Sunday Kickoff” deal which will grant those players signing up for an Ultimate online sportsbook $25 of free sports bets.

Finally, Ultimate Poker is planning to release a new software update within the next couple of months, which will offer more games than those currently offered by its competitors, and include a mobile and MAC user product. As Kobrin explains:

“We’re working on some amazing software updates and recently improved geolocation and added more payment options for players. Since we are the little guy, you’ll see a lot of innovative and interesting promotions that other companies aren’t doing, especially in Nevada with the live and online poker experiences merging. Players will see big improvements to our product in the near future, as well as the top customer service they’re used to.”