Poker pro goes all in with Seattle gaming company

Professional poker champion Phil Gordon has a simple philosophy: “You have to wait for a good hand, but once you get a good hand and you think you’ve got the best of it, then you have to be willing to stick your chips in the pot.”

It’s not just his approach to life. Gordon is trading the table for a computer as the CEO of Jawfish Games. The Seattle startup is developing a variety of real-time, multiplayer tournament games for smartphones and the web.

In an interview with KIRO Radio’s GeekWire show, Gordon shared how his poker experience directly impacts his approach to business.

“A lot of what we’re doing at Jawfish is building, testing, measuring; and when we find something that works, we go all in.”

Gordon was surprised to find of the over 135,000 games in the Apple app store, not a single one used a bracketed tournament format that let people play against each other in real time.

“Our thesis is that even the simplest games are more fun when you play them in multiplayer real time tournaments,” he said.

The poker pro is clearly not bluffing when it comes to business. His company has hired many of the best developers from Full Tilt Poker, a previous industry leader that was handling 200,000 simultaneous players in 100 countries and generating about $1 billion a year in revenue. The site was shut down by the feds.

Ironically, poker is one game Jawfish won’t be getting into any time soon. Gordon said it’s a “money pit” unless it’s legalized nationally.

“One of the things that you really need in any real time game is critical mass. You need enough people playing simultaneously so that the game is fun.”

Gordon knows what he’s talking about. Before he became a poker pro, the Georgia Tech computer science grad was the first employee of a burgeoning tech company that was sold to Cisco in 1997. He took his winnings and parlayed that into over a decade of poker playing, traveling, and making a name for himself both at the table and on the air as a commentator on Bravo’s popular “Celebrity Poker Showdown” TV show.

Now, he’s going all in with Jawfish, with a focus on mobile gaming.

“Just like in poker, you want to go where the money is. You want to go where the easy money is.”

It might not be easy, but there’s certainly plenty of action. Over one million iOS and Android devices are activated every day, according to Gordon. Plenty of players for the once and future card shark.

Listen to Phil Gordon’s full interview on the latest episode of the Geekwire podcast. Listen anytime ON DEMAND at KIRORadio.com.