Floyd Mayweather Stars in 'Wild Poker' Game

Floyd Mayweather is one of the hottest names in entertainment right now. The popularity of his recent bout against Conor McGregor managed to transcend the world of martial arts and got almost everyone excited about boxing again - at least for a little while. In his last fight Mayweather broke the legendary record of Rocky Marciano, earned at least $100 million dollars and managed to  add another argument in his favor in the ongoing debate about the best boxer of all time. A perfect bookend to a stellar boxing career. One of the more impressive things about Floyd Mayweather's time as a boxer was his ability to roll with the punches and receive the minimal amount of punishment in every fight.

As a result of his masterful defensive style, Floyd still has his wits about him and a relatively intact face to use as a moneymaking machine. While Mayweather might be ready to hang up the gloves he's not down for the count business wise. After all, "money never sleeps" and Mayweather got his nickname for a reason. Recently, Floyd earned himself another 6 figure sum by becoming a face of the mobile poker app "Wild Poker".

"Wild Poker"  and the Mobile Poker Revolution

Recent moves in the online poker market seem to indicate that the mobile space is where the future of poker lies. We have home game apps from Asia, new cryptocurrency based poker products that are putting a lot of emphasis on their mobile offerings and now we get the example of a mobile app targeted at the casual players with aggressive marketing strategy and a business model based on the in-app purchases. At "Wild Poker" players don't gamble with the real money - which conveniently circumvents any potential legal issues - but they can use real money to gain some advantage over the opposition.

Imagine a game of PokerStars Power Up where players don't receive an equal amount of said "power-ups" but can instead buy more of them with real money. Plus they get the option of using Floyd Mayweather as their in-game avatar. Mayweather's  face is also plastered all over the promotional materials in order to encourage his fans to download, have some fun with, and hopefully spend some money playing "Wild Poker". 

According to "Money" Mayweather himself:

"It's poker, but it goes to the next level. There's a whole new level of strategy with the power ups. It's a cutting edge game - this is that next thing".

Despite what the champ has to say about the game, its pay-to-win format (the more money you spend on power-ups, the higher your chance of winning) along with lack of monetary rewards for the players,  will discourage most of the serious poker enthusiast from playing the game. That said, poker world should pay attention to the popularity that "Wild Poker" will manage to earn, based on their marketing strategy alone. If the product ends up being successful among the casual audience, other poker companies might want to emulate "Wild Poker" approach.