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Poker Room
Sunday, June 12, 2005
online gaming poker site
June 12, 2005 Legal ambush could slash Party Gaming's £5bn jackpotDominic Rushe, Matthew Goodman and John Waples NI_MPU('middle'); LEADING American senators plan to attack online casinos by banning credit-card companies from dealing with them — a move that would seriously hinder Party Gaming’s access to most of its online customers as the company prepares a controversial £5.5 billion flotation on the London stock market. The proposed law is being sponsored by Arizona senator Jon Kyl, a long-time opponent of online gambling, and will be discussed by legislators after the summer recess. US authorities remain hostile to online gaming poker site and there have been several attempts to block Americans from participating in the burgeoning arena. Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association (AGA) and former chairman of the Republican party, said this bill was the most likely to get approval. The US has no jurisdiction over offshore companies such as Gibraltar-based Party Gaming; the bill would tackle the industry by blocking banks and credit-card companies from allowing US customers to use their accounts for online bets. The AGA is a powerful force in Washington and represents American gaming giants such as MGM Mirage and Wynn Resorts. It was instrumental in blocking a similar bill drawn up by Kyl because it carried exemptions for horse-racing and casinos run by American Indians. Fahrenkopf, who has seen an early draft of the bill, said Kyl’s new attack was more broadly worded and carried no exemptions. “We would not oppose it, if it stays the way it is,†he said. The US Department of Justice considers internet gambling to be illegal, but there have been several legal challenges to that position. Party Gaming, which will mention the legislative threat in its listing prospectus, has told analysts that it is not concerned. The new bill is being supported by Richard Shelby, the Senate banking committee chairman, who has called online gambling “uniquely evilâ€. Shelby and America’s attorneys-general, the states’ chief law enforcers, are also trying to force credit-card operators to stop doing business with online gambling companies. Pay Pal (owned by Ebay) and Chase have agreed not to allow transactions. The justice department is also cracking down on advertising for online gambling: Esquire magazine was recently forced to pull ads for one poker site, Bodog.com. Sports giant ESPN, Yahoo! and Google have stopped accepting such ads for their American sites. The illegality of online poker in America and the backgrounds of Party Gaming’s four billionaire founders will be scrutinised when the prospectus is published this week. So too will the role of the financial advisers, led by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. They stand to make as much as £44m if the £5.5billion float price is reached. DKW, which is helping to raise £2.3 billion from selling a 23% stake, will take the lion’s share of this fee. Sweden’s Enskilda and Cheuvreux of France have supporting roles. The big American and European investment banks have already turned down the mandate. Party Gaming’s five non-executives, who include the chairman Michael Jackson, are sharing $5m in one-off bonuses should the float go ahead, a move that is seen as highly unusual. They are expected to use the money to buy stock in the group. Pirc, which monitors corporate governance, said such payments were “not best practiceâ€. Jackson, who is also chairman of Sage, a FTSE 100 software group, has come under attack by some of his investors for taking the job. At Party Gaming he will be paid a £500,000 annual salary. Party Gaming’s founders, who will retain a 77% stake in the business, include Ruth Parasol, who in the early 1990s was heavily involved in internet pornography. She has since sold her interests in this industry. Parasol and her husband Russ DeLeon list their address as being in Gibraltar but it is not clear whether it is an office or home address. Despite the regulatory uncertainties surrounding the game, Empire Online is set to become the first online poker group to float in London. It has raised £123m, including £19m of new money, and will have a market value of more than £500m. Jag Mundi, head of corporate finance at Numis, which was adviser, underwriter and broker, said: “Empire has been extremely well-received by institutional investors in the UK and US.†Like Party Gaming, the company will have a highly paid non-executive chairman. Lord Steinberg, the Conservative peer and founder of casino group Stanley Leisure, will collect an annual fee of £200,000. Empire will be valued at about 14 times this year’s earnings, much lower than the 24 times Party Gaming hopes to achieve. It was priced “to goâ€, according to one source. Some prospective investors think Party Gaming will have to lower its expectations. One City fund manager said: “Never mind the dividend yield, this ought to be priced at a modest valuation and yet it doesn’t seem to be coming at a modest valuation.†poker room 11:27 AM
Friday, June 10, 2005
June 05, 2005 Inside the City: John Waples: Party Gaming float looks a little too rich NI_MPU('middle'); GET your head round this. The London stock market, which has some of the most onerous disclosure rules in the world, is to allow a company whose core business is very probably illegal in America, to list here. The company in question is Party Gaming, the world’s biggest online poker group, which is being groomed for a £5 billion flotation. Ninety per cent of its revenues come from the US, where the law on an online poker room is grey at the very best. This doesn’t seem to bother the UK listing authority, which is also giving special dispensation to allow the company to float only 23% of its equity (the rule is normally 25%). And because it is domiciled in Gibraltar, where it only pays local tax of 6%, the company cannot hold its annual meeting here to discuss important issues such as remuneration. Its share register will also be overseas. It would be very surprising if America allowed the company to list on the New York exchange, and US investment banks have already declined to advise on the float. Against that backdrop Party Gaming is drumming up institutional support in London to buy its shares over the next month. Its senior management people have plenty of reason to put on their best marketing hats. Aside from the huge windfalls for the group’s four founders, Richard Segal, its likeable chief executive, will be worth £50m if the float target is reached and he can sell £12m of shares on day one. His non-executives are also being suitably rewarded. To help justify Party Gaming’s proposed rating of 23 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, the company is using Sportingbet as its quoted peer. Anyone who can remember Sportingbet’s short history will know its share price has been up and down like Zebedee. At the moment it is bouncing high and so is online poker, but for how long? Party Gaming wants to use its paper to go global. But therein lies the rub — so does everybody else. The established gaming groups like William Hill and Ladbroke are moving into poker, and if it were ever legalised in the US, the big Las Vegas guns would be in there quicker than a New York minute. There is no question that Party Gaming is a great site, it is accessible and has the liquidity to attract players in their thousands. It has also enjoyed phenomenal growth in the past three years. A float will give it legitimacy round the world and propel it into the FTSE 100. But in doing so, the Footsie is putting its own reputation on the line and the risk factors in the pathfinder document will show by just how much. The company will float, but if it achieves a $10 billion ( £5.5 billion) valuation, I will eat my virtual chips. Multiplex I HAD a beer last week with John Roberts, the fiercely media-shy founder (and former chairman) of Multiplex, the quoted Australian company that is at the centre of the Wembley construction storm. Multiplex has received a caning for its admission that the completion will be delayed and investors have baulked at the expected £45m loss from the Wembley project. This paper dished it out with the best of them. Roberts took exception to one part of what I wrote — the inference that he had fallen out of love with his eldest son, Andrew, who is chief executive. He said he had spent the past 40 years building a valuable business to pass on to his children and had no intention of losing contact and not loving Andrew or his other two offspring. The debacle at Wembley and questions over the group’s ambitious British expansion strategy has seriously eroded the family’s paper wealth. Roberts remains confident that his son will ride it out, but nobody can deny that it is going to be a bumpy journey. poker room 2:27 PM
Friday, June 03, 2005
Players in any poker room any time
June 02, 2005 Confessions of an online gamblerBy Howard Swains, Times Online NI_MPU('middle'); When I first learned how to play Texas Hold 'Em after watching Late Night Poker on Channel 4, I was the only person I knew who played. And that, of course, meant that I didn't. A poker player without anyone to play against is not a player at all. That's when I discovered the internet. Although few of my friends could be tempted to sit around a table with nothing but a deck of cards between them, logging on to any number of online card rooms meant I could find a game at any time, for any stakes, with any number of players in any poker room. I could compete for 'play' money if I didn't have the real money to lose, or I could sit myself down with a week's wages and gradually distribute it across the world. I had neither the knowledge nor the bankroll to enter the intimidating surroundings of a bricks and mortar casino, but two or three nights a week I could be up against players from Las Vegas, Tokyo or Stockholm without ever leaving my home. These were the relatively early days of online poker, and though on the surface little has changed since, it is no longer such a solitary pursuit. Barely a day seems to go by without a news story surfacing about online gambling, and words such as "epidemic" are even used when discussing the recent surge in interest. Its success, though, is not surprising. Just as eBay managed to create and then fill a niche for global person-to-person trading, the major online poker sites brought together prospective players from around the world and offered them the opportunity to pit their wits against one another whenever they desired. The sites make their money from taking a percentage cut of any money wagered (up to a pre-defined "cap") and most recreational players hardly even notice this disappearing from the table. The boom in online poker was already well under way when the appropriately named Chris Moneymaker, a 27-year-old accountant from Tennessee, won first prize at the 2003 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, the biggest "real" poker tournament in the world. Moneymaker had won his $10,000 entry fee in an online satellite tournament, costing $40, and when he went on to triumph against a then-record field of 839 players, he had in effect parlayed $40 into $2.5 million. PokerStars, the site where Moneymaker had won his seat, seized the marketing opportunity with both hands, making the married, clean-living recreational player, the poster-boy of responsible gambling. Thousands of new players logged on, all hoping to become the new Moneymaker, and when Greg Raymer, another internet player, won the World Series in 2004, the field had swelled to 2,576 players and the first prize to $5 million. This year's tournament, scheduled for Las Vegas in July, is expected to be a 6,600-player sell-out, more than half of whom are likely to have qualified online. The winner is guaranteed considerably more than just their approximate $12 million prize with ESPN's television coverage certain to create another poker celebrity. Apart from an obvious gulf in ability, I am no different from either Moneymaker, Raymer or this year's winner. I have a regular job and a steady income and wager some of it in online poker tournaments. Although the chance of that big win remains a distant prospect for 99.9 per cent of players, myself included, the poker bubble shows no sign of bursting. poker room 9:58 AM
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Are you thinking about gambling online but are not sure which online poker room to trust? Your not alone. Thousands of people come to us every month for advice on which online casinos to avoid. Don't take a chance with your hard earned money by getting ripped off by bad online casinos. poker room 11:31 AM
Monday, May 23, 2005
Poker Room Etiquette
Etiquette Like any casino, we aim to create a good atmosphere in our poker room. To do this, we’ve put together some guidelines about acceptable behaviour. Violation of etiquette rules may in some cases lead to closure of the account and black listing to prevent this player from signing up again. Notoriously abusive players may get their chat privileges removed by us without warning. You can report abusive players to the site operators at our help page. poker room 8:48 AM
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Great Poker Room
Alamo Poker is a gre poker room online, to poker rules & best hands, without any annoying banners ads. We provide easy-to-find information to the poker community online and worldwide. With quick poker reference lists of the Top-10 in many categories, we hope you enjoy your visit and come back often. Here's to your next monster hand! poker room 1:47 PM
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Poker Room Etiquette
A little bit of friendly advice…learn these etiquette rules. Study and memorize them and put them into practice at every land-based Poker session. There’s nothing in this great big Poker universe that gives you away quicker than not observing these rules. The experienced players at the table will instantly peg you as a novice and eat you alive. Not bad strategy if you’re trying to down play your poker ability by acting dumb, but by now you’re probably used to playing cards with two good hands. At the table if you feel the need to chat to the fellow players keep it brief and light. Resist the temptation to critique another player’s poker ability, aggravate fellow players, or use profanity. There’s no need for it and it is very grade school. Keep a cool and level head at all times. No need to argue and shout at one another. It only creates a disturbance and reflects badly on your professionalism. Dealing a Poker game can be stressful for a lot of dealers. They work long and hard and mostly for minimum wage. They deserve a little respect. So what if you’re having a lousy day at the table, it’s not the dealer’s fault. They don’t deserve or need you’re aggravation or disrespect. Do not throw your cards at the dealers. And please, don’t try and disguise you’re displeasure with a dealer by speaking to the rest of the table in a voice loud enough for them to hear. Dealers aren’t deaf and they certainly aren’t dumb. Be polite with the way you handle your chips as well. Place the chips close enough for the dealer to rake them in and don’t stack your chips so that it interferes with the dealing. These are ways to create a better flow in the game. Don’t stall when it comes your turn to play. You’re not being clever, it’s a waste of time and it’s real bad manners. What would your Momma say? When you spot an indiscretion at the table, don’t be too shy to speak up. We’re all human and sometimes we can make a mistake by placing an incorrect bet. Maybe the pot is going to be awarded to the wrong player. Who knows? If it doesn’t look or feel right, speak up. Show you’re hand right away when you think you’re going to win the pot. Don’t make the dealer ask you to show you’re hand. It really does show your inexperience and slows the game down to a crawl. Don't deliberately splash the pot, act out of turn, or reveal your hand before the betting is complete when you're all in. When you’re going to leave the table, tell the floor person. Keep your playing space in an orderly way. Don’t clutter up the area with a bunch of unnecessary objects. You’re cash, chips and a card cover token will suffice. Exercise your common sense and do what you can to make the game run as smoothly as possible. Everyone will appreciate your efforts. Oh yea, don’t forget to smile every once and awhile and have fun. It could be worse. You could be playing Bingo. poker room 10:26 AM
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