After he began working on the platform last summer, the CEO tested it out on his own staff a few times a week to monitor its success and found that it was a big asset for company culture. On top of its event fundraising success, Nierenberg said the platform had additional benefits for his own company. “They’re searching for those points to connect with their membership. “What we found is that member-based organizations need something like this desperately,” he said. Nierenberg said the event was so successful that it led to Poker 501 events with hundreds of CEOs all along the East Coast, Canada and the Caribbean. In addition to Chance for Life, which this year raised $1.5 million for children’s cancer research with 490 attendees from 19 different states, Redpeg held a virtual poker event for the global leadership org YPO. The platform makes money when orgs pay to host events, and players pay to play. Participants can also stay in the game just to watch, and everyone can tune in to watch the grand finale at the end of the night with the last table standing.

Players are broken into groups of eight people but can switch groups throughout the game.

The virtual gaming software, built in TypeScript, React, Firestore and Node with WebRT integration, simulates regular gameplay, without the actual gambling. So six months prior to his event, Nierenberg teamed up with Nicholas Clark, the creator of app Poker in Place, to scale what he had developed and create Poker 501, an online platform for poker events. “It wasn’t geared towards customers for an event experience, and none of them had video and audio.” “I found out all them were really designed not for events - they were designed for poker players to play in a tournament to win tens of thousands of dollars,” Nierenberg told Technical.ly. But the CEO found that existing poker platforms weren’t designed with charitable events in mind. The solution? Hold the Chance for Life event virtually, of course. With all things IRL on pause during the pandemic, it didn’t take long for Brad Nierenberg to realize his Old Town, Alexandria-based event company Redpeg would likely be unable to hold its annual in-person charity poker event in February.

Host virtual poker night