PartyGaming’s online poker site, Party Poker, saw its share price drop another 13 percent on Tuesday, prompting analysts to suggest that its withdrawal from the US market in the wake of new US gambling law, may have accounted for a 90 percent drop in revenue.
Following its exit from the US market the company also made the decision to remove a ticker from the site which advertised the number of virtual tables in use and the number of players online.
Comparing Saturday night’s poker traffic with the previous week, Panmure Gordon’s Ivor Jones revealed, ‘Our very tentative estimate would be that rake and tournament fees would have been down more than 80%. Real money play appears to have picked up sharply at the poker sites which continue to operate in the US.’
A spokesperson for PartyGaming said the player and table number tickers had been removed because it did not want rival operators to use this information against it. One such rival, Israeli-owned PokerStars, has already begun an aggressive recruitment campaign in an attempt to leapfrog PartyGaming as the world’s largest poker operator.
Julian Easthope, a UBS analyst, said, ‘Liquidity drives revenues and PartyGaming will more than likely lose its market leading position.”
R10-million fine & 10 years jail for Online gamblers in South Africa
Online gamblers in South Africa could be fined R10-million or jailed for 10 years.
This was the ruling in the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday when Judge Willie Hartzenberg dismissed an application by Casino Enterprises of Swaziland to have residents of Gauteng gamble online.
The Togel Online casino had taken the Gauteng and the national gambling boards, as well as the minister of trade and industry, to court.
The basis for the application was that although the gambling was done on computers in Gauteng, the gambling was taking place in Swaziland.
888 Casino go Mobile
Online casino and poker gaming group 888 is close to signing deals with some of Europe’s bigger mobile phone operators to offer their customers gambling over their handsets, a source close to the company said on Thursday. “Some of the European mobile operators are looking to incorporate 888 mobile into their offering,” the source told Reuters.
“It’s in the final stages of negotiation.”
The source said mobile gaming was important to 888 as a means of acquiring new customers and helping them play wherever and whenever they wanted.
