Gambling News - June 2005 Edition

"Internet Poker Spawns Billionaires"

PartyGaming's owners, Ruth Parasol and her husband and two graduates of India's technology university set to become billionaires on successful floatation.

PartyGaming’s owners, Ruth Parasol, a former California lawyer who made her first fortune in the porn industry, her husband, and two graduates of India’s premier technology university, will become billionaires if the flotation of PartyGaming on the London Stock Exchange is successful.

Despite the matter of legality in the United States concerning online gambling, the industry and in particular online poker, is blossoming. While the U.S. wrestles with the problem of how to handle online gambling, Britain has forged ahead and passed legislation that permits online gambling, but with the confines of strict controls and regulation. As a result, one of the biggest online poker companies, Party Gaming, has decided to float on the London Stock Exchange at the end of this month. Estimates place PartyGaming’s value at 5.5 billion pounds and with flotation, it is set to become one of the biggest companies in England, overtaking such household names as Boots, British Airways, and Cable and Wireless.

The popularity of poker has grown quite phenomenally. First fueled when television stations started televising the Poker World Series back in 2001, and then even more with the advent of Internet poker. The rise of Internet poker has been nothing short of spectacular. Audiences watching the Poker World Series became hooked and started wanting to play. The appearance of such celebrities as Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire and Sarah Jessica Parker at these tournaments attracted even more players to the game, creating a fast growing industry. Last year, the online poker market grew by 466 percent in 12 months, reaching 1.4 billion dollars. Industry experts predict that those numbers will double this year bringing the amount close to 3 billion dollars.

The online gambling industry has its detractors who generally claim that the easy access to gambling that the Internet provides will result in increasing numbers of addictive gamblers. Counselors at Gamblers Anonymous, an organization that provides counseling to people with gambling problems, are already seeing the results of the Internet gambling boom first hand. Referring to the dramatic rise in the number of calls the service receives for gambling addictions, a spokesman for Gamblers Anonymous said: “gambling on the Internet is like pornography on the Internet. Clicking a screen on a computer is a lot easier for many people than going in to a sex shop and buying the goods face to face.” Most of the callers blamed the Internet for their addiction. With all of the money being made from Internet gambling, it is unlikely that anything will be done to slow or stop the rapidly expanding industry.

Pokerpulse.com, an online poker monitoring service, reported 200 million dollars in wagers in just the last 24 hours alone! Richard Segal, CEO of PartyGaming, says “using Internet technology, we have given people the chance to play in their own homes, whenever they feel like it and without the prospect of having to look their opponents in the eye if they were in a real-life game”.

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