/ THE BRIEFING / NEWS
NO
YES
THE BIG DEBATE
THIS MONTH, WE ASK:
WILL POKERSTARS SUCCEED AS A MULTI-VERTICAL OPERATOR?
JAMIE NEVIN
MARK DAVIES
founder at 180Vita
managing director at Camberton
O
ne must consider what
exactly qualifies as a
success for PokerStars in
both sports and casino. It
could be that maintaining a
respectable poker ecology,
while diverting a sizeable
chunk of revenue/player
activity towards these other
products, is enough to satisfy the company.
Even without a clear
definition of success, I believe
PokerStars is a clear threat
to traditional egaming operators. Everyone has watched
them out-manoeuvre the rest
of the pack in a competitive
online poker market over
the last few years and I see
no reason to bet against it
becoming a serious player in
online casino and sports.
Firstly, they will face many
of the same competitors,
including the likes of Playtech, 888 and bwin.party. By
now, they understand how
these companies operate and
should know how to position
their offerings favourably
when competing with them.
W W W. E G R M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Secondly, many of the
tools PokerStars requires to
become an egaming success
are already in place such as
software development, customer support and payment
processing. Most in poker
agree that PokerStars is king
in many of these areas so why
should casino be different?
Scaling customer support
to also cover casino is by no
means an insurmountable
task for a company like this.
I believe PokerStars has a
significant edge in product development. While
most others use software
providers, Rational develops
in-house. This leads to a
smoother user experience
and will help PokerStars
differentiate its offering from
the standard white-labels.
It seems that far too many
assume they w