Industry Talk: Baadshah Gaming Co-Founder Madhav Gupta Talks About His Latest Venture, Upcoming Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament & Future Plans

Industry Talk: Baadshah Gaming Co-Founder Madhav Gupta
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  • PG News September 4, 2017
  • 3 Minutes Read

Wins, top scores, tournaments and pros are the most visible face of the poker industry and are constantly written about. Little is written or known about the back-end or the business machinery that runs the industry.

In this PokerGuru Industry Talk, we bring you people who remain unseen, but are the key components in running the poker industry. These pioneers are responsible for evolving the poker industry constantly and as is the case of India, where poker is yet in a nascent stage, for bringing in the best trends and practices of the game for domestic players.

This time we spoke to Madhav ‘Maddy’ Gupta (cover image), who has floated the site Baadshah Gaming and is a long-time veteran in the industry having managed the poker room at Casino Pride for over seven and a half years. Gupta not only has a deep passion for the sport, but had been foraying into its non-glamorous side and recognizing the opportunity present in the current boom of online gaming in the country, decided to jump straight into the deep end after gaining enough experience to host poker games.

In this PokerGuru interview, Gupta talks about his online venture Baadshah Gaming, the reasons behind the postponement of the Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament and shares his views on the current trends in online gaming. Gupta in this candid interview, also shares with us his long-term vision for the industry along with some important updates including his close collaboration with the Pride Group. Here are the excerpts –

Please tell us about Badshah Gaming and the key people behind it. What are the key roles they play?

I am the co-founder and managing day to day operations of Baadshah Gaming. So, we have been involved in live poker operations for a long time and I have been operating the live poker operations of Casino Pride for the last seven and a half years. We have been closely watching the online space and we really wanted to do something in online gaming for a while now. We were figuring out how to enter the market without facing any legal hurdles.

Over the last couple of years, a lot of ventures have started for online poker, now the whole system has become a lot cleaner. We have seen judgments from a couple of states in our favor. For example, Calcutta and Bangalore categorically stated that poker is a game of skill. Places like Sikkim and Nagaland are giving particular licenses. A lot of other states are currently discussing about it as well so we thought this would be a good time to launch Baadshah Gaming.

I shifted from Goa to Mumbai in September last year to specifically concentrate on Baadshah Gaming. Our goal is to basically be the one-stop shop for multiple games of skill. We are not just a poker platform but we are offering fantasy sports and rummy as well. We launched in March with two separate games of skill i.e. poker and fantasy cricket. Rummy was added later and there are a couple of other avenues that we are looking to add too in the near future. We have some interesting fun stuff in the pipeline.

Recently we had Casino Pride take a sizeable stake in Baadshah gaming. We believe that will help us drastically towards building but our plan is to become the number one player in the market in terms of credibility. There are a lot of players coming in and going out of the market, we saw a lot of players who came with short-term goals of instant gratification, making money in the short-term doesn’t play well.

Our tie-up with Casino Pride will also help us a lot. We will be taking over the poker room of the Casino Pride as well so currently I operate the poker room but I am planning to sub-lease the poker room to Baadshah Gaming.

Our number one agenda was that we wanted to focus on the credibility of the website, there is obviously no entry barrier in the industry. There have been a lot of websites that had started and stopped the operations, so our goal was very clear to be involved with a credible partner so we took care of that as Pride Group acquired a stake in our company. The product is secure and the people operating the product are secure as well. Today, the majority of our sign-ups that we acquire for Baadshah Gaming are the live registrations through Casino Pride and the properties they are involved with.

There are certain promotions running in Casino Pride for which we have hired a fairly large marketing team who specifically looks after sign-ups at these locations. So now Baadshah Gaming is supported through the Pride Group. We have 12 people in Goa who are specifically for live marketing at Casino Pride and we are also taking help of their regional marketing team. They have a regional marketing team of almost 30 people across the country; we are using their help to market our product. With the launch of rummy on our platform, the number of signups from the new game will increase too.

Please tell us about the different sports option like poker, fantasy sports and rummy. How do you see growth of fantasy sports now that rummy and poker have gone mainstream in the country?

I will not say that Poker has truly become mainstream or very popular but yes Rummy is a huge market. Rummy is mainstream and there is a huge market of players who play it. Both online and live, they’re breaking the barrier of bringing younger players also to play online rummy. Live Rummy turned out to be more of a retiring sport mostly played in local clubs. Only when it comes to online, the target market is the same of poker that is till age of 45 years, tier one and tier two primarily.

So, we will target the 18-28 age bracket and also target women for rummy. Poker seems to be a lot more progressive than it really is and I think a part of the reason is that the entire poker universe is very small and most of the people in that universe seem to know each other. If you look at any of the Indian sites or Facebook forums or even media websites like PokerGuru, you will see a lot of people who you already know and I think that’s the big barrier that needs to be broken.

Even if you look at live tournaments, we used to have 150 people in 2012 and now we have just 300 people in 2017. So, we have not really progressed a lot and we really need to see numbers like 500 entries or 750 entries or 1000 entries. In my opinion today honestly fantasy sports is bigger than people tend to give it credit for. The number one website for fantasy sports in India today has one crore signups, that’s 10 times larger than what India’s biggest online poker player has. For fantasy sports, unfortunately 95% of the market ended up being captured by a single player, our hope is that this market also gets a holistic growth by having multiple new platforms coming up, as well as new sports being offered.

In terms of Baadshah Gaming, we are looking to add two more games that will offer fantasy contests in near future. We are looking at adding Football and Kabbadi and also offering more games within cricket itself. Also, more series, like adding the Women’s Cricket Series etc. In terms of overall fantasy sports, I am very bullish on it. There has been only one player till now but given the fact that there are a lot of sites who are interested in offering these games, I believe that it will also progress the same way that poker has, by getting more and more users.

The point at the end is how many players stay in the market. With each new site, player pool will also increase and the biggest question remains – who will manage to benefit from all this in 5-8 years?

What was the primary vision behind your new venture Baadshah Gaming? How has been the response so far?

Our philosophy for the online venture is very similar to our live venture. Baadshah Gaming does not do any cash transactions or any credit or any agents. We are purely a democratic site in terms of our marketing so what that means is, a player can come and login to the website, we have standardized the model of rake back. Goal is to do stuff that makes sure we are running for 10-20 years at least. Things like credit or agents are bound to go down at some point. Traffic on the website is also very good as we are getting close to 350 sign-ups a day. We have a target of reaching thousand signups per day this year.

There are currently 4 to 5 tables running on the website however that being said, we believe this to be a long-term business and we don’t expect action to just increase in a night. The way we have structured our site, there is no cash and no credit. Also, there are no agents and no stables. We do believe that for organic growth, it will take time. There is a dirty secret in the current poker industry that every website has their staked players. I can confidentially say there isn’t a single player on our site.

If I introduce these strategies it won’t take long to fill up the tables within three days but our goal is not that. We are looking to make it a success keeping in mind 15 years of run. And if you have to build a 15-year-old business, you can’t take short cuts. We don’t expect drastic changes in our table size and offerings. Our goal is to keep it a non-reg player site that offers standard rakeback deals. All the details about rakeback are available right there, so we are very transparent. We do not like any discretion when it comes to these things.

Our next big thing is going to be rummy. We believe that rummy specifically will be massive on Baadshah Gaming.

Please tell us about the promotions that are currently being running on Badshah Gaming.

We do freerolls worth ₹2000 five times in a day, so ₹10,000 real cash in freerolls. These are not locked. There is no locked money or bonus money on our site. Our site works on a singular currency that is Baadshah coins – that’s it. The money in your account is real money and can be withdrawn at any given point in time. We don’t have any agents and affiliates and we don’t expect too. Usually the websites agents in affiliate’s models work like, they get 35% or 45% rakeback but only 15% to 20% reaches the player. The rest all goes to the agents so we would like to give every extra incentive to the player itself, that’s the idea behind it.

We have also launched three guaranteed tournaments. Our goal is to aim at the bottom ground of the market so in order to do that we have a ₹60K GTD on Thursdays and two ₹20K GTD events that happen on Tuesdays and Wednesday. The buy-in for the ₹20K event is ₹200 and buy-in for ₹60K GTD is ₹400. Response has been good till now, we have a good overlay, so in the case of our ₹60K GTD, we offer 150% guarantee, but that is a part of our marketing strategy. We believe that we would almost always have overlays, so the day we touch like 150 people in these events, we will increase the guarantees to say 200% GTD and so on. The idea is not to cover the overlays.

What are your plans for the upcoming Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament in Casino Pride? Please tell us the reason of postponing the series.

For Baadshah Gaming Live Tournament happening in Casino pride, all I want to say is that players most likely have never seen an event like this. It’s going to be a more fun event in terms of setting. The total buy-in for the series will be around ₹75,000. We are not looking to host events which have players spending upwards of one lakh in terms of total buy-in. What I can tell you is that the total prize pool and the numbers will be really big for this event. It’s going to be a 100% rake free event.

The idea was that we wanted to do something which has never been done before which is an open-air poker tournament. We were thinking of rebuilding the entire deck for the event and believed that till September we will have ample time to build it. After relooking at it, the concerned department told us that it couldn’t be done by September so we had to postpone it, something that we never wanted to do.

However, we have made an announcement to our database and we want to put it out through PokerGuru as well, that any player that has already made bookings in terms or flights or hotels and had to cancel because of this, we would be happy to come in and compensate all those players. The players can get in touch with any of our support teams, whether it’s on mobile app, Facebook page, live chat or email support@baadshahgaming.com and we will be glad to take care of any cost incurred by the players.

We have already done that for a few players who reached out to us because at the end of the day we do believe that we have ample of time but in case anyone has suffered inconvenience because of us, we would not want that to happen as we were not able to deliver.

The revised dates are something that the team is working on right now. We want to make sure that players don’t miss any international series and I expect the dates to be decided and announced soon.

Any hints on the schedule and other promos at the series?

So, the poker room and Casino Pride has already been renamed Baadshah Gaming Live. We will be hosting satellites both live and online at our property. We will be doing a bunch of satellites both live and online. Online satellites will include processes like step satellite as well, so there will be satellites for particular events and there will be satellites for the total series too. We will also be giving some early bird offers in terms of additional tournament tickets. We are also in talks with multiple live rooms to host events as well. Wherever there is a legit live poker room, we will be looking to host events there for satellites.

We have recently set up a call center within our organization for customers. It is based inside our organization so queries are solved and answered to immediately by the site representatives. I have a 7-member team only for answering calls and queries. We are working very hard on our cash out mechanism. Normally it’s a three-day cash out procedure, ours is within 12 hours. We process cash outs twice a day and our security team replies within six hours. We have a dedicated security team in Barcelona which checks for hands played, players, chip dumping etc. Once the security team clears all the procedures, a player never has to wait more than 13-14 hours for his cash out unless it’s a Sunday.

Please tell us about the current poker scene at Casino Pride and the strategies to take the action further as its been long we have heard news about games there.

On weekdays, we are running three tables regularly and on weekends we are running five tables consistently. Primarily 100/200. Baadshah Gaming is fairly a new venture but even there currently we have 4-5 tables running always.

We are a bit slow in terms of tournaments we host online and we want to be fairly cautious. As many websites are coming in the market and as many websites leaving the market. We are running a bunch of tournaments and overall velocity of online action is similar to what we do live. We are not looking to host ₹5,000 buy-in events just yet. Our goal in the next few months at least will be not to introduce buy-ins more than ₹1,000.

We are very happy with the live poker action at Casino Pride. We made a few changes about two years ago, for example we completely changed the model at Casino Pride. Pride was earlier known for its high stakes games, it was the spot to come if you wanted to play at ₹1000/₹2000 stakes. Five lakhs buy-in – ₹10 lakhs buy-in, so we were the only casino in the country which has run the highest of games which was the ₹5000/₹10,000 blind game but over a couple of years we have changed the model completely and now we are looking to promote lower stakes games which are your ₹100/₹200 games. We even introduced the concept where in a number of regulars at a table be capped so by regulars I mean players who are settled in Goa to grind or who play professionally. In Pride (Casino Pride), you will not find more than four regulars at a table, so even if there are regulars waiting they will not get a seat if the table already has 4 regs (regular players). I will not run an all-reg table at all. We are looking at things from a long perspective rather than just making money for a couple of years, all these changes will help us be in action and in the industry down the line in 10 years.

We have seen competitors from markets who have staked players playing on their website, they don’t care about how many regulars are playing at a table and things like that. Casino Pride has also been very supportive of this because they don’t give any target of number of tables to be running in a month or something. They don’t demand any fixed amount for revenue generation. They’re looking at quality of games rather than the quantity of games. It is a very long-term vision that they have shown and I would like to thank Pride for it. They are not interested in four or five or six tables running but they’re interested in the quality of tables that are running and this limitation is a big factor of that. We have been hosting a special promotion that anyone who plays in Casino Pride gets real cash on Baadshah Gaming.

What are the plans for Badshah gaming in future? How do you see yourselves in the next five years?

Going down the line five years we expect Baadshah Gaming to be spread out to different verticals as well. We are the only site which offers a single wallet across games. That we believe will be a game changer and will help in adding new players to the industry. As of now fantasy players only play fantasy, poker players only play poker, and definitely the same with rummy too which has primarily been restricted to South India. So, having a singular wallet across games will help players to be introduced and learn new skill games as well. Our goal down the line in 10 years will be to be one of the major players in the space.

I don’t necessarily like to speak about how I see things down the line. I know what stuff needs to be done and I know how to do it so we will get there.

Amen to that Maddy! Thanks for the time and good luck for your new venture!

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