And now for something slightly different.

Which explains, to me, what Party is up to. You don’t have to have a degree in marketing to understand the following extract from PartyGaming’s press release concerning the recent move:

We are on track to deliver our exclusive Party-branded integrated platform that will include additional products and services, enabling us to focus on optimising cross-selling opportunities. We believe that today’s development is an important step towards cementing together the inherent strengths of all the Party brands and is in the best interests of our customers and shareholders. In conjunction with this exciting development, we will continue to maintain and support the poker system we provide for the skins.

In other words, we want poker players to play other games, and we want our casino players to try out poker. And we don’t want other sites’ poker players gate crashing our synergistic de-verticalised top up bottom down cross-selling opportunisationals. Or something like that.

So, as you’ll see when you log into the new Party Poker software, you can do three things you couldn’t do before Saturday, and you can’t do one thing you could do before Saturday. While you can’t play against players logged in on any of the other skins, you can now play Blackjack and make side bets on the flop in Texas holdem, and you can broker deals in tournaments to chop the winnings among the survivors, instead of playing to a finish. The last of these is something that at other sites has been available before now, and as it’s something you can do in live play, it’s a welcome addition no doubt to the tournament gaming experience. It is also deeply irrelevant to the current discussion, so let’s put a pin in it for now.

The other two new features share one very obvious characteristic. Whereas poker players are used to playing against other poker players, both the side-bets and the blackjack game are clearly games in which you play against the house. Normally, you’d expect to find these sorts of games by logging into casino software, and not poker software. At Party, though, from now on, all you have to do is click in the right place in the lobby, and you can play Blackjack. It’s not a game I play, so I don’t know what the edge is either way, but it’s a house game, and Party wouldn’t be offering it if they didn’t think they were going to have a substantial enough edge (or any edge at all, I suppose) against you and me. Similarly, with the side-bets, where you can bet on whether you think the flop is going to be all red cards or all black cards, Party has the edge on you here, and this time it’s to the tune of 6.5%. Now, any decent poker player worth his salt will tell you that’s a –ve move, and not a bet worth making, but of all the players signed up or yet to sign up at Party Poker, how many will appreciate that and follow it? To put it another way, even poker players can’t resist the odd –ve bet from time to time, and just as those fish who constantly play against the odds and get lucky sometimes keep coming back for more, and help to keep the market buoyant for the rest of us, so Party must be hoping that all its members can help to provide it with some easy money from time to time. I won’t be funding Party with either of these – the side-bets because they’re ludicrously –ve, and the blackjack because I don’t really enjoy it, it’s –ve, and it appears to have crashed my system when I tried to run it for the first time…

Back to the important point in that last paragraph – Party Poker is now offering casino-like games through its Poker client. There, I’ve said it. (And why did it take me so long, you’re wondering, I expect.) I had thought initially that the strategy would be to get the market to focus on other aspects of PartyGaming’s network, such as the casino side, because that could be seen as a more reliable long-term bet. However, despite a longer and steadier growth pattern for online casinos, all is not entirely wonderful in that garden either. 888.com floated at the end of September 2005 to a lukewarm reception, with shares dropping from 175p to 170p on first day trading. It seems that they were caught up in the wake of pessimism, despite the fact that only a small part of their revenue comes from their Poker offering, Pacific Poker, whereas PartyGaming, although operating substantively in the same markets, is known for the poker side much more than the casino side.

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Tags: Poker, Party Poker, Empire Poker