- Partial bonuses will be fully credited to players’ accounts, and all players received 45% rakeback for play in the final week.
- “If we wanted Run It Once Poker to survive so that it could hopefully, one day, thrive, we needed to do something differently.”
- That pivot will be, according to Galfond, an entry into the US regulated markets.
Real money online poker site Run It Once Poker has closed down after almost three years of operation.
As of Monday, January 3, all real money games and tournaments are suspended. Players are instructed to request withdrawals between now and April 3. Partial bonuses will be fully credited to players’ accounts, and all players received 45% rakeback for play in the final week.
Phil Galfond, founder of Run It Once, cited declining traffic over the last 18 months as one catalyst for closing, and also mentioned development problems and mounting costs in a candid blog post announcing the closure.
“With traffic having dwindled below pre-pandemic levels after all of the progress we’d made, it became clear to me that we weren’t going to break through and reach the volume we needed to, just by completing our platform and doing a bit more marketing,” Galfond wrote in the blog post, dated December 30. “The hill was too steep. It was going to take a lot more.”
“If we wanted Run It Once Poker to survive so that it could hopefully, one day, thrive, we needed to do something differently. I hear that in business, they call this a pivot!” he added.
That pivot will be, according to Galfond, an entry into the US regulated markets.
“I’m holding back some of the finer details for the time being (I’ll have more to share in the next few months!), but the bottom line is this: Run It Once Poker is now headed down a path to enter the legal & regulated US market,” he wrote.
“This has been a dream of mine since well before we first launched. I didn’t initially think it would be an option for us for another half-decade, so I’m very excited to be on our way to achieving it!”
