Exclusive Preview: Poker - A New Hope (Part 1)
One year on from Black Friday, Tom Victor examines what has changed and the questions that are still to be answered.
More than one year has passed since the United States government indicted the principals of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, but many rightfully feel we are no closer to a resolution, at least as far as the future of the poker companies involved is concerned.
Some expected a clearer idea of the background to what has so far been a mysterious chain of events, which have led to banker John Campos and payment processor Chad Elie being charged with helping to disguise poker related transactions. The pair were due to stand trial in Manhattan on 9 April, but eleventh-hour plea deals reached by the duo riled many intent on the case progressing transparently, not least prosecuting federal judge Lewis Kaplan who demanded to know why the government was “walking away from the case” by allowing Campos to agree to a single misdemeanour charge and minimal custodial sentence.
The activity of Full Tilt in particular was shrouded in mystery even to those closely monitoring the operator’s activity before its demise, with Alderney Gambling Control Commission executive director André Wilsenach admitting the day after revoking the company’s licences that the operator had been kept in the dark about “material events”, including US authorities seizing payment processors used by Full Tilt as long ago as 2007.
Filling the void
The departure of Full Tilt Poker (and ultimately the Cereus network) from the US and Rest-of-World markets left a sizeable gap, which operators sought to fill in the immediate aftermath of Black Friday through the launch of spur-of-themoment promotions. However, a number of the remaining sites and networks, including Ongame and Party Poker, have actually experienced declines in the intervening period.
Figures from tracking site Pokerscout show Party Poker’s cash game traffic as having declined 4% year-on-year while Ongame’s is down 24% based on the corresponding period in 2011, despite the former seeing traffic climb 23% in the week after Full Tilt’s Alderney licences were suspended. PokerStars’ 16% decline is perhaps misleading if compared directly to the year-on-year fluctuations of non-US-facing operators.
The company’s European and Rest-of-World business partially plugged the losses from its US exit as a significant number of former Full Tilt players moved over to PokerStars in the second half of 2011.
The other success story of the last 12 months has without doubt been 888, which continued to gain players while the remainder of the online poker industry was moving in the opposite direction. Figures provided by the Gibraltar-licensed operator show it had already opened up a 119% gap on the industry [in terms of deviation from its starting number of players] in the 18 months from January 2010 before extending this to 198% at the time of writing.
“The big spike came when Full Tilt closed in June 2011,” explains 888 COO Itai Freiberger, who suggests that his company “ along with PokerStars “ were the main two beneficiaries of Full Tilt’s exit from the market. “When Black Friday happened, we altered the marketing activity but we didn’t change our strategy from June 2010 when we went into a new approach in poker,” he adds, noting that the operator has climbed more than 10 spots in the Pokerscout rankings since that month, leapfrogging many of its competitors in the process.