As the current leader in online poker, Pokerstars has a marketcap estimated to be in the region of 14 Billion USD. All this success while the stigma surrounding the company is still considerably poor, with punters believing their systems to be rigged. Worse again, there is a constant fear of a repeat of "Black Friday". That is, the darkest day in online poker history when Full Tilt Poker (since acquired by PokerStars) revealed itself to be a Ponzi scheme, shutting down suddenly taking with it hundreds of millions of dollars from online players.
This is an industry absolutely crying out for transparency and a decentralization of power - the blockchain is everything online poker needs right now! And some major players in the worlds of Poker and Blockchain have realized this and have been hard at work on their startup - CoinPoker - in order to bring this need to market in 2018.
As a poker player first, and a cryptocurrency enthusiast second, I have to admit hearing about this ICO, I was skeptical. It seemed like just another attempt to rally some funds together under the guise of "blockchain hype" but upon downloading and playing poker on the already fully-functioning software, I realized this was anything but hype.
This is going to be huge. There are already thousands playing in the freerolls, which run every 30 minutes and there is a great deal of excitement about the transparency of the entire project. The pre-ICO was a complete success, selling out in 6 days and with the recent announcement of the "mine a Tesla" tournament series, I have no doubt that all eyes will be on this ICO yet again when it goes live later this month or early February. Pokerstars is in big trouble if CoinPoker can keep doing what it is doing.