In a digital world, community takes different forms. Here, dedicated teams from tombola, PokerStars and Sisal explain how their vibrant player communities are developing, and how it enhances the overall player experience.
When thinking about online dating, images of swipe-based apps and somewhat embarrassing dating profiles likely come to mind – but probably not a wedding ceremony and marriage born from a tombola chat room! The rise of social media and the digitisation of many experiences has seen ‘social betting’ become an increasingly important part of punters’ gaming experience. Whether celebrating a bingo win with friends, calling someone’s bluff in poker, or sharing a hunch on a football match, certain forms of betting are inherently sociable. Today, social betting – at its simplest, sharing in the fun with fellow players – is gaining increasing momentum online, and is proving a powerful force across Flutter and its brands. Indeed, the fact that marriages have developed on these platforms is testament to how strong the communities of brands like tombola have become.
ENTERING THE CHAT AT TOMBOLA
At tombola, one of Britain's largest online bingo communities, there has always been a strong social aspect, with vibrant player chat rooms firmly established as the online equivalent to a bingo hall. “Every room has its own personality,” says Emily Marshall, tombola’s Marketing Communications Manager, who started as a chat host herself. “People talk about that night’s Emmerdale episode one minute, and what their kids are up to the next. Regular players have a conversation like friends and people make lasting connections through our games, which is special.” These interactions – which enhance the player experience by creating a “race to the finish” feeling when you’re waiting for one to go - are not confined to the digital world, with tombola players often meeting in person to connect. In fact, a couple of marriages can be traced back to what started as playful interactions in its chat rooms.
This sense of community is reinforced through game design choices, such as the introduction of the bingo50 format which levelled the chance of winning whatever the stake placed. Dawn Howe, Head of Brand and Planning at tombola, explains how this “really helped establish the community, because everyone had an equal chance of winning as the prize varies with the stake.” Players also shape features directly: the 10,000-strong Player Panel, launched at the start of the 2023, is surveyed monthly, while players give constant feedback through chat, social media (where tombola enjoys market-leading engagement), and via its website and app.
"Keeping the player experience at the heart of everything we do"
This feedback can be acted upon remarkably quickly thanks to tombola’s deep vertical integration, which enables community facing and product development teams to collaborate efficiently to produce positive change. For example, tombola’s Game Studio, wanted to bring Cinco, a flagship game more in line with tombola’s current branding and utilised the player panel to develop the updated designs. Once it launched and after receiving feedback via chat and social channels, the Game Studio made further enhancements to the game user interface.
A strongly engaged community doesn’t just benefit tombola – it creates further value to its customers in what is increasingly a symbiotic relationship. For instance, tombola’s in-house Game Studio recently adapted their popular ‘Deal or No Deal’, swapping out the full house winner having a chance to win a second prize for a chance for every player to be able to enter a bonus round. “Why not open it up the community?
“Keeping the player experience at the heart of everything we do at tombola and making sure that they have a voice at every stage of our product development lifecycle, means they feel hugely empowered, listened to and a valued part of our community.” Dawn comments. “Today, the majority of players have been with tombola for over a year, with some totting up more than 15 years, reinforcing that we’re creating great gaming products that we know our players love.”
Social betting and the communities it creates naturally promotes diversity, both in the array of people involved and the different strategies they each bring to a game. This is particularly true of poker, which combines sociability with skill within its format. Players from all walks of life, some with brash personalities and others more discreet, are able to inform one another on their play as they compete. “To me, social betting is about playing against peers, and in some cases with peers, which happens in poker – as it has a big community aspect despite being an individual game, we learn together outside of the table,” says May Maceiras, a former professional poker player and now PokerStars’ Senior Commercial Advisor.
This concept of sharing strategies is reinforced through PokerStars’ work with well-known ambassadors, like Lex Veldhuis and Benjamin Spragg, who create content about their approach to the game, as well as their own blogs, news feed, and online courses that aim to upskill players. Last year PokerStars’ followers, viewers and subscribers totalled 17 million, racking up 651 million video views. Engagement rates around this content is similar to Netflix’s – the average player watches PokerStars’ live streams for around 60 to 90 minutes – and retention is twice as high for players that watch PokerStars content on broadcast platforms, compared to the rest of its customer base. “Engagement translates into players playing better overall,” says May, “which from all perspectives is exactly what we want. We want our customers to enjoy the game.”
Community based on trust
This enjoyment is clearly on show at the community’s live meets, with PokerStars’ flagship European Poker Tour (EPT) now in its twentieth year. The largest fixture, EPT Barcelona, most recently gathered 4,966 unique players alone, with the full live events circuit around the world taking that figure to around 30,000 annually. As well as celebrating players’ skills, the events bolster inclusion; the 2023 Women’s Bootcamp initiative to support women in the game received 244 bootcamp sign-ups, a 74% rise on the previous year, from which 10 players were eventually brought to EPT Cyprus. “This was extremely successful in terms of raising awareness on diversity,” says Scott Goodall, Marketing Engagement Director.
If issues do arise, players can flag them through PokerStars’ VIP managers, social media, or in person at events, and the conversation goes two ways – players will be contacted if, for example, they suddenly start to change their stake size. Which may seem counterintuitive says Scott, but the focus is always on building a long-term relationship with the community based on trust: “You want a customer to still be playing because they love the game in 10 years’ time.”
Furthermore, strong communities like the one PokerStars has fostered are able to come together and protect each other from bad actors. Indeed, a well-known case in 2009 saw players from another platform piece together evidence and work through online forums to eventually catch a cheater who was viewing other people’s cards during games.
SISAL’S 360-DEGREE SPORTS
Over at Sisal, Flutter’s leading Italian omnichannel operator, in-person communities have been integral to the businesses’ success since its foundation in 1945, with 40,000 retail outposts in Italy today. While a communal atmosphere around betting is nothing new – whether friends placing a group bet in a shop or planning the same via WhatsApp – a major shift taking place is sports betting enthusiasts sharing their predictions more widely via online channels. As Francesco Taricone, Head of Sportsbook Product at Sisal, explains: “For the first time, this phenomenon started to become a full-time job for some, and we started to think about how to build this kind of experience into our product.”
Launched in December 2020, Sisal’s response to this trend, Tipster, blended social media with sports-betting through a dedicated product, with customers able to share their bets within that community. The more skilled a ‘tipster’ proves to be, the more visibility they enjoy on the platform, and so their following grows. More than 60,000 monthly players now use Tipster – which is fully integrated within Sisal’s website and app – representing a monthly average of 15% of Sisal’s almost 400,000 active users, a percentage that is increasing even as Sisal’s wider betting community grows also.
In addition, Sisal is also building community elements into products that sit outside its traditional sports betting focus, as seen with Fun Club, a football-themed mobile game featuring leaderboards and players competing for grand prizes, like cars and iPhones, which drew 100,000 players to its HTML version even before its official launch.
Despite the diversity of their communities, these brands and their players also benefit from being part of the wider Flutter Group. This means the teams at tombola, PokerStars and Sisal can draw on the Flutter Edge – the Group’s global competitive advantage where product, tech, talent and capital are shared across its worldwide portfolio – to bolster everything from responsible gambling practices to the latest innovations. “For us, the huge gain from Flutter is the data insight area,” says Dawn at tombola, who works with colleagues across the global business to draw on what they know about their respective community’s wants and needs, rather than looking for outside inspiration to create their next format. At PokerStars, meanwhile, they can offer their community a variety of play options outside of its poker focus, such as the launch of the PokerStars Exchange in 2022, while at Sisal, they have created product innovations such as DUO – where a bet rolls over to the substitute player in football if your selection is replaced – that has inspired a similar feature at Flutter’s Paddy Power brand called Super Sub.
Of course, just as it has been shaped by technology, community will continue to take different forms in the years to come. At tombola, that could mean social mobile games leading new players to bingo and inspiring new innovations. At PokerStars, its virtual reality offering, Vegas Infinite, already allows players to customize avatars to interact within vibrant virtual environments, and at Sisal, the focus is on improving how they connect to their community, whether via artificial intelligence, augmented reality or in-person connection. “The most important thing that we have learned is that a betting product itself is a social experience,” says Rafaella Leoni, Sisal’s Marketing Director. “Being online can be solitary, so everything that adds to that value of community is crucial for us.”
