Industry News

Isabelle Mercier and Burt Reynolds

Live Poker Nights in Canada
Poker Night Live, the world's first televised Internet poker program, has arrived in Canada. The show originated in the UK on live gaming channel Poker Zone, and won the accolade of "Poker TV Programme of the Year" at the 2006 UK Gambling Awards, courtesy of its refreshing, unique, and innovative approach to bringing online poker into living rooms.

Poker Night Live will feature two-hour broadcasts in Canada (11 p.m.-1 a.m.) with homegrown hosts and poker professionals, including Tina Teggart, "Johnny T" Tokatlidis, and Devin "Devo" Armstrong.

Big Screen Next For WPT
The World Poker Tour will get its first Hollywood close-up with a starring role in the upcoming film, Deal.

WPT hosts Mike Sexton, Vince Van Patten, and Courtney Friel will be playing themselves in the film, alongside the film's stars, Burt Reynolds and Bret Harrison.

Deal, directed by Gil Cates Jr., can be characterized as The Color of Money meets the poker world. It tells the story of an ex-gambler, played by Reynolds, who teaches a hotshot college student how to "play the player," instead of just the cards.

The film concludes at the WPT World Championship, and those scenes were filmed immediately after April's real-life $25,000 buy-in event.

Veteran actor Charles Durning is also a part of the cast, along with poker aficionado Shannon Elizabeth and WPT faces Phil Laak and Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari.

Villa In The Red
Online casino and poker operator 32Red has reached conditional agreement to be the new official club sponsor of Premiership football club Aston Villa.

The two-year sponsorship deal, which includes a logo on the home and away shirts, comes into effect for the 2006-2007 Premiership season.

More Reason To Party
The online poker group PartyGaming has revealed that revenues are up 54 percent, as record numbers of players gambled more money on its tables.

The operator of PartyPoker, which is based in Gibraltar and is the world's largest online poker company, said revenues hit $342.6 million (£193.3 million) in the first three months of 2006.

PartyGaming said that 39 percent of the new players were from outside the United States, where the future of online gambling is under threat from proposed legislation that would ban it.

Meanwhile, the engineer who developed the gambling software for PartyPoker has been named as one of Britain's richest Asians.

Indian-born Anurag Dikshit, 34, co-founder of PartyGaming, has shot into the number three spot on the annual list, with an estimated fortune of £1.7 billion.

Stars Are Floating?
The Sunday Times has reported that Pokerstars, the world's second-largest Internet poker company, is preparing to float on the London stock market before the end of this year with a value likely to exceed $2 billion (£1.1 billion).
It is believed that Pokerstars is in talks with a number of investment banks, including HSBC and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, about hiring them to work on the listing.

Both banks are experienced in leading IPOs for online gaming companies. HSBC previously led the flotation for 888, the operator of the world's largest online casino, while Dresdner floated PartyGaming. 888 is currently trading at a value of $1.4 billion, while PartyGaming is traded at a value of $10.6 billion.

Pokerstars, like its counterparts Empire, 888, and Playtech, is controlled by Israelis. The company's controlling shareholders are Isai Scheinberg, who lives in Canada, and an unknown Tel Aviv-based businessman, Pinchas Shapira.

They are believed to jointly control a 75 percent stake in the company, with the company's employees owning the other 25 percent.

Sources believe Pokerstars has annual profits of $150 million-$200 million, and will therefore trade at a value of $2 billion.