But only facebook players from UK will be allowed to play, others will still only be able to do play money, right?

Is there are info on how much of zynga play money players are from UK? Like some country statistics, etc?

i laughed so effn hard reading this.
ty and you're right Sir.

It will be sad if/when this flops to see such a former behemoth reduced to the state of what Bwin Party now is/will be.

Poker revenue down 40% this year, panhandling in an unproven market lots have tried unsuccessfully to monetise with a former billion dollar bubble company that is firing half its staff, closing offices everywhere and is worth less than the assets it owns.

As business strategies go it is either very clever or very dumb.

Pokerfuse had a lot of details on this and then I just saw PartyPoker put this out http://www.partypoker.com/blog/featu...bwinparty.html looks like it's going to happen, have to move to the UK!!!

A few things make me skeptical:

- The overall #s (traffic/likes) from Zynga are probably much higher than the #s from UK Zynga alone.

- UK has some of the most player friendly gambling laws and accessible first rate online poker rooms in the world and have for awhile. Many players that want to gamble with online poker probably already do or have before.

On the positive side:

- There's really no negative here. It's not like when you take a small country and add it to your player pool, where there's plenty of pros and fish alike. These will be remarkably bad players on average that are joining Party Poker fresh.

The big question though is how many new players will there be? We'll know soon enough.

How are they so friendly, do you pay tax on winnings there?

The big negative is that a huge group of players who have not only had the option to play money poker, but have been bombarded by Facebook advertising for every offer and room under the sun for months will probably not magically convert to real money play en masse - particularly in arguably the most competitive gambling environment on earth - and certainly not at the stake levels needed to run a poker room profitably any time soon.

The huge expense involved in setting up and launching this platform is taken directly from the % of money returned to Party's players through loyalty schemes and their marketing budget which brings in actual fish, and many would consider that a huge negative.

No

The bad thing is both bwin and Zynga are shady companies that no one trusts.

Party are completely overhauling their software in early 2013

Why do you all think this will be huge? Good marketing isn't going to persuade hundreds of farmville players to play online poker.

Lol, why would Zynga do this? Here, have some cash for these play chips we sold you, just to be nice.

lol i dont think you understand what this thread is about. Zynga already offer play money poker via FB, they're now going to offer real money poker to them (potentially) not to farmville players ffs.

fwiw, good marketing can sell anything to anyone.

are you serious? running a promotion where they convert say 1m play chips into $10 to play with and obv put in some "can't withdraw for x time" clause or even run it as a bonus... is the goat idea. It basically solves the problem of getting ppl to convert from play chip zynga FB app to their real money app.

You're not going to get the average person playing free games suddenly paying money to play. They aren't interested.

strongly disagree.

people already pay real money for various "power-ups" in for fun games on FB all the time.

with aggressive RM marketing in their play money games (and aggressively marketing people accross the pay barrier is what these free fb games are all about), you could see some serious growth imo.

If you're dismissing this out of hand, you probably dont understand very much about marketing/monetizing these fb apps.
there are already a ton of FB gambling apps. Mostly slots. They are real money to the extent that you can buy chips, bonuses, addons, etc. But they are not true real money because the chips you can buy for cash have no value -- they cannot be cashed out.

That is to say, right now, FB games are getting people to buy in for real money with the full knowledge that the chips/features they are buying are valueless and can never be cashed out.

If theyre already getting people to pay for worthless chips, how much easier do you think its going to be to get them to buy chips with actual value.

and, as a side note, how bad do you think the players already buying the valueless chips are going to be?

There is a huge leap from paying for bonuses or extra games to actually gambling on the internet. I have many Facebook friends who play all the free games but not 1 of them are interested in gambling on the internet. They know I play real money poker and they simply are not interested. I realize that is a very small sample but I think you are being far too optimistic thinking that suddenly all these fish are going to get out their credit card and degen their rent money.

Thats what im saying!!! Anybody that wanted to play online poker for money would have done it already.

Well, Zynga and Party Poker mean business! I have just started out in poker, but can tell you from my research that they needed to make this move in order to remain competitive. Now, they can increase their player pool and offer more attractive games and, with Zynga's gaming experience, they can potentially offer a unique user experience at the poker table. Exciting to see how it all unfolds...

There it is - their stock has hit the floor. They wouldn't use up close to 20% of their cash if they didn't expect to turn a profit soon.

Time to start buying - $2.31 a share right now. I'm gonna bump this in a year when its $20+.

That's quite a silly argument. Why does anyone bother to spend anything on marketing if this is the case?

If someone wanted to do x they would be doing x already so why bother marketing x to them?
Fallacious argument imo.

If you look at the traffic on poker************** you will see Zygna has almost 450% as many players playing for free compared to Pokerstars.

If they convert at the same rate of players who spend real money to buy fake chips (approx 2%), they will be as big in real money player terms as Party, Ipoker, or Ongame.

Very exciting news.

I had to get a password reset for my party account just because of this

Here's hoping they will be able to expand to other countries soon

Zynga's UK-based RMG service and bwin.party will launch RMG products including Poker and a full suite of 180 Casino games in the first half of 2013, which include table games such as slots, roulette and blackjack.

Yup board members buying huge amounts of their own stock is invariably a very good sign.

This has to be completely wrong view.

I don't think you understand the power of advertising.