Friday January 16,2015 : AMAYA UPDATE REVEALS SPORTS BETTING PLANS
Preparations are ahead of schedule and will be backed with vigorous marketing.
Amaya Gaming's much speculated launch of an online sportsbook for its subsidiary Pokerstars will take place in Q1 2015, with preparations already ahead of schedule, a business update from Amaya revealed Wednesday revealed.
The sports betting product will launch within the Pokerstars poker client in at present unspecified legal markets, which will be expanded with the addition of web and mobile offerings later in the year.
Amaya chairman David Baazov said that the roll-out would be supported with a vigorous marketing campaign that would additionally embrace the group's online casino ambitions evident on the new Pokerstars 7 platform.
Pokerstars will also launch web and mobile versions of its casino in 2015, supported by an aggressive marketing campaign.
Baazov says that Pokerstars estimates it has achieved a significant double-digit share of Spain's regulated online casino market in an earlier launch of the casino offering, despite the absence so far of external marketing.
The company reiterated results released last week by communications chief Eric Hollreiser that showcased a 30 percent cross-sell of casino table games to its active player base on PokerStars 7 in Spain.
This was better than had been expected and represented a faster cross-sell ramp up than was experienced on Full Tilt despite table games being the only casino games available, the update reveals.
A majority of daily active users played multi-player games.
The casino games on the Spanish site were withdrawn late 2014 in order to modify the offering to allow players to download their hand histories – a regulatory compliance issue, the company confirmed, saying it intends to re-launch within a matter of weeks.
The update emphasised that this did not impact its international roll-out of casino table games.
Other highlights of the update include:
* Pokerstars continues to promote poker in Asia, opening one of its Pokerstars LIVE branded poker rooms at the new City of Dreams land casino in Manila, Phillippines, extending the profile already achieved by a similar establishment in Macau
The company now has branded, live poker rooms at major land casinos in a number of major cities including London and Madrid, and the parent Rational Group can justifiably claim to be the biggest provider of live poker tournaments and events worldwide.
* Pokerstars sister company Full Tilt has made available a real-money poker app in iOS and Android format.
* A play-for-fun poker offering, titled Pokerstars PLAY is also available on iOS and Android platforms.
* In addition to winning many industry awards, Amaya Gaming is a finalist for 2014 Toronto Stock Exchange Technology Stock of the Year, and Baazov himself is a finalist for 2014 TSX Technology Executive of the Year at the Cantech Letter Awards Thursday evening.
* Pokerstars continues to promote transparency, efficiency and operational integrity to engender trust and understanding of the online gambling industry, with a continuing series of videos showcasing the company's internal workings and activities.
* The company currently handles massive volumes of online poker activity, including on average 700 poker hands a second 24/7 and 365 days a year; of every day with up to 20,000 hands being played concurrently. It also offers 3,500 daily scheduled tournaments, which award more than $25 million in guaranteed prizes to hundreds of thousands of players every week. Pokerstars' technical capability in
running massive online tournaments is impressive – the company has had up to 481,488 players in action on-site simultaneously.