Piper Pipped, Top Tweeters, and Bountiful Bets

It’s been a month of both major and minor triumphs for your Card Player Europe team. Firstly, congratulations to our pot-limit Omaha strategy columnist Michael Piper who came fourth in the PokerStars.com European Poker Tour San Remo event in April for a cool €345,000.

Who knew he played no-limit hold’em?

Secondly, TwitterGrader.com has crowned @CardPlayerNews the leading English-language poker media twitter site. Out of 10 well-known European facing, English-language sites graded using the comparison software we received a rating of 97.5 out of 100 placing us at the top of the pile and on the cutting edge of poker social media in Europe.

Come joins us on Twitter and look out for our new Facebook page, complete with a plethora of exclusive special offers, news, features, prizes, gossip, live reports, and much more coming soon.

Finally, well done to our betting columnist Roy Brindley who successfully tipped up two very fine winners in recent horse races in this very magazine netting your editor (and himself no doubt) a few euro. We hope you were on too.

Let the good times roll!

Poker Profits Plummet

It’s first quarter financial results season among the big players in online poker and unfortunately for them the good times seem to have ground to a halt.

PartyGaming poker revenue down 11 percent, iPoker network down 4 percent, William Hill Poker down 11 percent, 888 Poker down 15 percent, Betsson Poker down 26 percent, Entraction network down 25 percent and Svenska Spel poker down 18 percent (in full year 2009).

Only Austro-German giant bwin bucked the trend with poker revenue up 26 percent in 2009.

So where has it all gone wrong?

Obviously the recession is taking its toll and, along with restricted access to the lucrative U.S. market, has acted as a drag on these once rampant operators.

But its not all doom and gloom as share analyst James Hollins of Daniel Stewart & Co. tells us in his article in this issue.

Confidence that the U.S. market may be about to rebound from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is slowly creeping back into the market but it is a market that seems increasingly focused on business-to-business (B2B) activity rather than business-to-consumer (B2C) activity.

Could it be that they are taking their eye off the goose that laid the golden egg?

When the global economy finally drags itself out of its current mire the world of online poker is likely to change significantly for both operators and players and in the present gold rush for B2B partnerships we are seeing the first anointing of this new dispensation.

How will it conclude? Most likely with national governments (including the U.S.) wresting back major control over their web space and taxing and regulating licenced online poker rooms which will jump start, in earnest, the consolidation the market so badly needs.

France and Italy are blazing a trail down this route and everyone involved; government, operators, and players, seem reasonably happy.

This will have both advantages and disadvantages for players with less choice of games, competition, and promotions to avail of but safer places to play.

It’s still too early however to tell which way the wind will blow online poker but you can rest assured that over the next 18 months its going to blow up a gale for sure.