Winnipeg company reaches for stars with Moon Poker gaming app

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This article was published 08/04/2025 (184 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A pair of Manitoba brothers are all-in on a poker app that offers users the opportunity to participate in Texas hold ’em tournaments for cash prizes, without the need for any purchases.

Joseph Sworyk and Andy Sworyk of Osborne Village-based software developer JAM Digital Solutions are co-founders of Moon Poker. The space-themed, ad-supported, mobile gaming app offers one 30-minute “hyper-turbo tournament” every day at 8 p.m.

Since launching in June, Moon Poker has expanded its user base to 6,000 monthly users.

The Sworyks are poker enthusiasts who play Texas hold ’em with friends every week. According to Andy, their goal was to build an app that eliminated two barriers to entry: most people don’t want to sit and play for two-plus hours and most don’t want to gamble their own money.

“We had the team for it — every skill you need to build out an app like Moon Poker — so we thought, why not build the poker app we’d want to play?” Andy said.

In his view, most poker apps are old fashioned, difficult to navigate and feature bland designs. Moon Poker aims to be engaging for the average person who’s trying to have fun, he said.

“You don’t have to be a hardened player to enjoy Moon Poker,” Andy said. “It feels like you’re (playing) a video game.”

When users register, they receive 15 stars they can use to enter tournaments. Players can earn extra stars through achievements, watching advertisements or by making in-app purchases, allowing for extended play and progression through the app’s levels.

The nightly prize is a minimum US$100. Occasionally, Moon Poker offers a much larger prize; the largest thus far was US$3,000. Users also have the option of playing mini games that last anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes.

The Sworyks and their business partners (there are currently nine people in Moon Poker’s ownership group) hired a lawyer to write a legal opinion stating, because users aren’t risking money, Moon Poker does not qualify as a gambling app. Rather, it’s a mobile game with a poker theme.

Apple’s app store and Google Play accepted the legal opinion, and as such, the app is available throughout Canada and the U.S. — including states where online gambling is illegal.

Moon Poker is available in the 17+ section of app stores and users must be at least 17 years old to collect cash prizes, though there is nothing in place currently to deter people younger than 17 from downloading the app.

The fact there is only one daily tournament is one of the safeguards Moon Poker creators have in place to prevent people from spending too much time on the app, as they might with any video game, Andy said. “There’s no angle where they can be dumping thousands of dollars into it.”

That Moon Poker users don’t have to make a purchase to play is interesting, according to Divya Ramachandran, a marketing professor at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business.

“It’s kind of taking a bit of the risk away, which means with the lower risk comes the chance of more people using the app — which is of course what they want,” Ramachandran said. More users means more ad revenue. “It’s a nice little double-ended approach that they are taking.”

Marketing efforts have included hiring brand ambassadors like podcaster/actor Bob Menery and U.S. social media personality Bryce Hall. The Sworyks and their partners have also been promoting the app on university campuses across North America.

California, Texas, Manitoba and Ontario are some of the regions where the app is most popular, according to the Sworyks.

“It’s kind of cool to be able to build something other people are using,” said Joseph, who was a software engineer at Amazon for four years before co-founding JAM.

Moving forward, the brothers and their partners plan to “reinvest in the prize pool as much as possible,” Joseph said.

“We’re hoping to eventually be giving out thousands of dollars a night, if not tens of thousands of dollars.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca