Better Get This Party Started

Online poker and gaming behemoths PartyGaming and bwin waltzed down the corporate isle at the end of March, exchanged vows and became one. The honeymoon period was short-lived however with news that German legislators were hell bent on squeezing the life out of companies hoping to gain a legally solid foothold in the vast online market there.
Shares in the company plummeted on the news (see Industry News), analysts engaged in hand wringing, and investors went a whiter shade of pale. This was not how it was meant to be.
One of the main areas of concern is that gross turnover, including poker turnover, would be taxed at 16 percent. This seems an impossible figure for any company to live with commercially and makes the recently regulated French and Italian regimes sound positively utopian.
The uncertainty expressed by the markets reflected in the share price of bwin.party digital entertainment (an impressively unwieldy moniker) is also mirrored in the online poker community. Players and observers are trying to second guess upcoming decisions on the nature of how bwin poker and PartyPoker player liquidity will be combined and what will happen to bwin’s Ongame network which the company has intimated is surplus to requirements.
These decisions will have a significant impact on the European poker landscape as one entity is likely to be created that can potentially challenge the industry’s two big hitters, PokerStars and Full Tilt. On the other hand Ongame, which cost bwin almost €500 million in 2005 and whose most high profile recent partnership was with Betfair Poker, could seem like a busted flush after its biggest room, bwin, jumps ship later this year. Whatever outcomes unfold from these decisions will determine the winners and losers. Let’s hope no-one forgets the humble player in this land grab.
Renaissance Men
One recent takeover success which has benefitted players as much as the corporate money men is the PartyGaming purchase of the World Poker Tour.
The resurgence of the Tour has been quite remarkable. Less than a year ago it managed to scrape together just 171 runners in London at a time when the world’s biggest and best were hitting the city and running a successful poker tournament should have been akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
Fast forward a few months and 681 people took part in the L.A. Classic, 555 played in Vienna, and 523 hit the felt in Venice, while France hosted two events, and the Tour hit Slovakia for the first time.
The appointment of Matt Savage as executive tour director in summer 2010 appears to be paying dividends and varying the buy-ins to suit regional cultural and economic conditions has also introduced a much needed flexibility.
Despite the live poker schedule appearing overcrowded the renaissance of the WPT shows that you can’t keep a good man down, that perhaps the circuit isn’t as crowded as we might have thought, and what punters want is lots of choice and flexibility. ♠