This story is sponsored by Party Poker
bwin.party yesterday completed the long-anticipated migration of its bwin.com poker players to the PartyPoker platform.
bwin announced the transition on its poker blog yesterday morning, following 24 hours of downtime while the migration was completed, as providing bwin poker players with “a larger player pool, even bigger and better tournaments” and access to Party’s fast fold variant, FastForward Poker.
The company paved the way for the injection of bwin players earlier this year by taking steps aimed at rebalancing the PartyPoker player pool in favour of more casual players, removing high stakes tables above US$5/$10 and amending its contract with a large affiliate it said had been driving large numbers of marginally profitable players to its sites.
Group co-CEO Norbert Teufelberger said in the company’s H1 earnings call in September: “We had to go through this exercise before we merged liquidities, because otherwise the bwin players would have been eaten alive, as this is primarily a fish pond, so we had to rebalance it, as otherwise the liquidity merge would have been a disaster.”
The migration of bwin’s players from the Ongame platform that bwin.party recently sold to Amaya Gaming provided an early boost to PartyPoker traffic, moving the bwin.party-owned platform into clear third position ahead of Playtech’s iPoker in PokerScout’s cash player traffic rankings.
The liquidity merge across bwin.party’s brands in open dot.com markets – which includes its poker platforms in the regulated Danish market – is also expected to allow it to challenge player numbers at Full Tilt, where traffic continues to plummet from its post-launch high early last month, down 56% by last week, according to PokerScout.
bwin.party sites now pooling dot.com liquidity include its own bwin, PartyPoker, Gamebookers, Empire Poker and WPTPoker brands, as well as its B2B platform for ex Danish gaming monopoly DanskeSpil.dk.
bwin.party is also shortly to merge liquidity across its platforms in the regulated French market, where its brands include bwin.fr, PartyPoker.fr, as well as B2B platforms for ACFPoker.fr and PMU.fr. Again, the move is expected to move it ahead of iPoker in terms of cash game traffic.
Article written by Stephen Carter
