‘Grey Snow Poker’ for ‘Grey Market’ Players

Iowa Tribe launches rake free online poker site that charges by the buy-in, not the hand.

Remember a few years back when the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma was building PokerTribe.com, an online poker site it promised would revolutionize the world’s legal, real-money internet poker scene? Yeah, don’t worry, that epic failure is not what they’re touting the launch of this week.

Instead, they’ve gone live with a poker site they call “Grey Snow Poker”. It’s got a unique profit system that claims to operate on a no-rake online poker structure.

Rake Free Online Poker Site

Although its creators say Grey Snow Poker is “rake free”, don’t take that too literally. It’s not really “free”. They just don’t charge what all other poker rooms define as a “rake”.

Technically speaking, a rake is a percentage of each pot that goes on to see at least a flop, collected by the host of the game as a means of profit. The average rake is 5%. So, a typical $0.01/$0.02 NLHE hand that reaches the showdown with $5 in the pot would be raked at $0.25. The hand winner gets $4.75, the poker site rakes the other $0.25 off the top.

At Grey Snow Poker, instead of charging a per/pot rake, the Iowa Tribe makes its money by charging a flat fee based on the buy-in to each cash game table. They call it a “service fee”, collecting 3% of the buy-in from every player who joins a cash table.

Managing Director George McIntosh explains:

“This means that if two players sit down with $100 each in a cash game, the total service-fee will be $6 regardless of how many hands or hours are played.”

So, each player immediately coughs up $3 of their $100 buy-in, then plays for as long as they like—or as long as their remaining $97 allows. Kind of sounds like a tournament fee, doesn’t it?

The Tribe believes this particular poker model will appeal especially to recreational players. “We think that this, coupled with random seating, will make the playing environment more fun, more thrilling and a more level playing-field than other sites,” said McIntosh.

Grey Snow Poker for Grey Market Players
(That Means You, Canada!)

When the Iowa Tribe first began working on the now-defunct PokerTribe.com in 2012, the concept was to build an online poker site that could legally cater to US and international players. Many years and lawsuits later, that site—which never did reach real-money availability, and eventually died off as a free-to-play poker room—clearly wasn’t the answer.

For now, at least, Grey Snow Poker is not open to US players. It’s licensed by regulators in the Isle of Man, and currently open only to players in “grey market” regions of the world—places like Canada, Germany and Russia, where the laws don’t explicitly prohibit real money internet poker games.

No doubt, the launch of the free rake online poker site is intended to get some kind of profit rolling in before they look at any other options they may have. If the flat-fee format turns out to be a strong success, then they can start looking at the legality of such a platform in other areas of the world.+