The Danish entrepreneur behind recently launched online poker site T6Poker.com, Torben Hubertz, is defending claims over how much he has spent in an effort to make the site one of the largest in the world by the end of 2008.
Thirty-one-year-old Hubertz claimed that he is targeting Scandinavia and Germany with fund-raising efforts for the new site with a planned marketing budget of over $22 million, which is larger than that of Coca-Cola in Scandinavia.
As part of this campaign, he stated that there would be television and radio advertisements at the end of 2007 but critics point to the fact that these have not materialised apart from a few ads in poker magazines.
According to its business prospectus, 250,000 players from other unspecified poker sites would be brought to T6Poker.com from January while these extensive operational expenses would be funded by a promotional scheme in which the site offers marketing and promotional affiliates a 63 percent share in the financial distribution of all profits realised from the rake. The partners are to first invest around $990 each with the plan being to recruit 40,000 such investors.
‘We have a budget for advertising and guaranteed tournaments much higher than most other sites," said Hubertz.
‘We have done, so far, 200 fully branded taxis in Scandinavia with T6Poker.com. We also have about 600 full-page ads in almost all poker magazines and newspapers throughout Europe.
‘We will also build a big team of pro poker players that will be playing at the big live tournaments all over the world and we have teamed up with an affiliate marketing company that has 10,000 to 15,000 people that will help us find customers also.’
T6Poker.com is registered in Costa Rica, licensed by Moravia and was launched in early-December. Initially offering its games through a Rapidshare link, it soon announced that it had run into alleged bandwidth problems that caused tournament cancellations and extensive negative commentary. The site stated that it has since switched to the Cyberarts poker software platform in time for operational targets of January 2 to be met.