Party Poker Ceo
PGCB member Terry Johnson (pictured) grilled GVC Holdings CEO Kenneth Alexander about his Ladbrokes Turkey decisions.
Partypoker (formerly stylized PartyPoker) is an online poker card room. Launched in 2001 by PartyGaming, the site has had up to 80,000 players logged-in and was the largest online card room until 2006. The Winning Poker Network has become a top destination for poker in a short amount of time, with its CEO emphasizing the importance of shifting to an Agile framework for the company's success.
Nevada Gaming Control Board (GCB) gave Euro online-gambling giant GVC Holdings conditional approval on several different fronts. One of those is for an interactive gaming license that is expected to bring the return of the PartyPoker brand to Nevada.
GVC Holdings received approval to operate in Nevada for the first time. Meanwhile, GVC’s licensing means partypoker could return to Nevada for the first time since 2006, when the US Congress enacted the UIGEA law.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board met with several of GVC’s key executives in their bi-monthly business hearing where they addressed licensing matters involving GVC. Among those interviewed was GVC’s CEO Kenneth Alexander. Regardless of contested issues by Terry Johnson in the May 8 interview, GVC was able to walk away with a conditional approval for its Bwin.Party (USA) entity.
Bwin is the parent company of GVC’s PartyPoker operations, which include the online-poker and -gambling portion of GVC as well as the MGM-owned Borgata in New Jersey. MGM has been in recent works with GVC with discussions of potential casino partners. However, MGM Resorts is not the only operator that GVC Holdings might partner with in Nevada.
Ladbrokes Coral Group
The GVC also received conditional approval from the NGCB to partner with Ladbrokes Coral Group as their intermediary company. This could push GVC to push their partnership with casinos. The Ladbrokes brand might possibly to put in to compete with the William Hill sportsbooks and kiosks currently running in the state.
PartyPoker Licensing Possible
GVC still has a long road ahead of them and the process to kick off its PartyPoker brand. PartyPoker will be required to apply for a full license. The company has two years before that time comes.
Once two years pass, the Party brand will be handed back to the state, which was last available to Nevada residents as a grey-market offering by the old PartyGaming.
Back in 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act forced many UK and European poker sites out of the US market. PartyPoker, one of the biggest card sites on the Internet at the time, was one of those companies. It was a huge blow to the company’s revenues.
Party Poker Return to Nevada?
Since then, PartyPoker has seen several different owners. Its current owner, GVC Holdings, has grown over from a mid-sized company into an online gaming giant. GVC now owns major brands, including Bwin, Party, Ladbrokes, Coral, Gala, SportingBet, and EuroBet.
Due to their now more diverse group, they have acquired a certain number of grey-market gaming sites, or at least sites that work in the gray market outside of North America and Europe. To gain licensing in the United States and other major marketplaces, GVC Holdings continues to tweak its business model, hoping to become a purely white-market operator.
GVC and Ladbrokes Turkey
Terry Johnson, a member of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, questioned Kenneth Alexander and other GVC execs about their presence in Turkey. When GVC acquired Ladbrokes’, it inherited Ladbrokes’ Turkey operations, which NGCB members considered “shoddy”.
Kenneth Alexander explained that GVC Holdings weighed their options in Turkey, then ultimately walked away from the Turkish market. That was not the decision in every case.
According to reports in the gaming media, GVC Holdings was in no hurry to cut loose some untrustworthy operations. In fact, one prominent media outlet alleged GVC falsified certain Turkish-based credit-card transactions in order to cover up continuing gray market activities.
Terry Johnson Grills Kennetth Alexander
Terry Johnson brought up the subject of internal fraud with Alexander. Johnson, who claimed fraud was endemic, said to Alexander, “People were actually stealing from you. They were defrauding you and because you were engaged in questionable activity, you were without much recourse to go after them because of what you yourself were doing as a company.”
“I’m actually surprised at the glossing over what has transpired with these payment transactions, particularly as it related to the essence of regulated gaming here in Nevada.”
Kenneth Alexander Defends Record
Johnson also criticized Mr. Alexander’s supposed lack of responsibility as an executive. The PGCB member said, “I’m at a loss to understand where exactly did the buck stop in the company if it didn’t stop with you. [How] are we to be assured that going forward you’re going to be at the helm of this company in a different manner than what transpired over the past several years?”
Partypoker Com Free Play
Despite the lack of support from Terry Johnson, GVC Holdings managed to walk away victors with the 2-1 split decision. Mr. Johnson was the dissenting vote. Chairwoman Sandra Douglass Morgan and Phil Katsaros found in favor of GVC’s Nevada gaming license. Both agreed that GVC had done enough to earn conditional approval.
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This week the World Poker Tour announced it plans to deliver a holiday gift to New Jersey poker players. Coming December 27-29, the partypoker US network will host its first ever WPT Main Tour online event.
Called the WPT Online Poker Open, the $3,500 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament will feature a $1 million guaranteed prize pool. The World Poker Tour will live stream the final table on Dec. 29.
In addition to earning the first prize, the winner of the event will join the WPT Champions Club. The winner will also receive free entry into the $15,000 WPT Tournament of Champions. The winner’s name will also be added to the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup, joining the names of other winners dating back to the WPT’s start in 2002.
Party Poker Ceo Film
New Jersey event part of WPT’s continued ‘pivot online’
In March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and resulting shutdown of live poker forced the WPT to alter its live schedule. Live events were all postponed, and the tour found ways to continue online via partypoker‘s global site.
An initial WPT Online Series ran on partypoker in May. The series culminated with a $3,200 Main Event won by Christian Jeppsson. The Swedish player topped a 2,130-entry field to win nearly $924K.
The WPT World Online Championships followed, also playing out on partypoker’s global site from July through September. That one ended with a much larger $10,300 Main Event that drew 1,011 entries to create a prize pool of just over $10 million. Winner Phillip Mighall of the UK took away just over $1.55 million.
The late December tournament will be the first WPT event on the partypoker US network. Presently the network consists of three skins, all restricted to players physically located within New Jersey:
Satellites to the Main Event will run on all three skins with buy-ins as low as $5.
In the announcement, WPT CEO Adam Pliska characterized the event as part of “WPT’s continued pivot toward online.”
Meanwhile Angelica Hael, vice president of Global Tour Management, referred to the continued collaboration between partypoker and the WPT, suggesting “this $1 million guarantee will push our partnership to new heights.”
WPT joins other tours exploring online options
The WPT’s announcement comes less than a week after the World Series of Pokerannounced plans to conduct a hybrid online-live 2020 WSOP Main Event starting in late November and culminating Dec. 30.
That event will be played in part on the WSOP New Jersey site as well as on WSOP Nevada and the global GGPoker site before concluding with live action both in the Czech Republic and Las Vegas.
The WSOP already ran an 85-event online series on WSOP NJ, WSOP NV, and GGPoker from July to September.
Both the unusual circumstances presented by the pandemic and legal developments for online poker in the United States are encouraging the WPT’s plans in America going forward.
At present partypoker US hopes to expand its network to other states, including in Pennsylvania and Michigan. However no new sites will launch in those states until 2021.
Once they do, the forging of a multi-state agreement could enable partypoker US and the WPT to expand online player pools considerably for events such as the WPT Online Poker Open.