Playtech considering buying Amaya:

Gambling software company Playtech is pondering a £250m bid for software developer OpenBet and another for Canada's Amaya. The FTSE 250 company has been under pressure to spend or return its £600m cash pile, the Sunday Times reported, with the potential warchest expanding to £800m if stakes it owns in its rivals are sold.

Not a fan of how playtech does their business (unless you like playing at casinos that demand that you physically mail notarized identification to the Philippines in order to cash out winnings.) Not a fan of how amaya does their business.

Not sure if one company with no respect for their players buying out another company with no respect for their players is a net negative result or if it's about the same.

Those numbers seem a bit low for a buy-out as it stands though, guess they'd to find some more money to stack onto their current cash reserves.

Yep, they have been doing the Philippines trick for years now. Shady.

That is not even getting on to their worst behaviour - stealing millions from players which ended up back in the hands of owners. Cliffs are they basically forced a progressive jackpot winner to accept only 50% of her win and pocketed the rest

http://online_casino_news.hundredper...casino-and.htm

Amaya and Playtech would be a match made in heaven

Amaya disclosed yesterday that the seller's rep to the acquisition escrow account has rejected all its claims for indemnification related to the Kentucky lawsuit. Is that because it's still on appeal and they don't know what the final judgement will be? Or was it unforeseen at the time of the acquisition?

You're a little confused. Nothing was "rejected". Amaya is trying to make the case that the Scheinbergs should be liable for any Kentucky judgment, and so yesterday they notified the 3rd party escrow agent (and the sellers / Scheinbergs) that they intend to seek recourse (for any Kentucky judgment, which they're appealing) against the $300M in remaining escrow funds. The sellers (Scheinbergs) filed a notice disputing Amaya's claims. Nothing's been approved/rejected. It's just being disputed at present. Will likely end up in court. Or perhaps made moot if Kentucky judgment is reversed.

Please tell me that there is a 0% chance that Playtech acquires PokerStars.

there are very low chaces close to 0%

So I've been watching pokerscout.com closely over the last 6 months. There does seem to be quite a lot of variance in daily peak real player counts, and ofc there are weekly trends, for some reason traffic actually seems lower on weekends.


Anyway over the last couple weeks traffic has been nosediving. Yesterday's peak hour saw only 22.7k real players online. That's down almost 33% from last months peak I believe.

The larger story here is this is essentially exactly what I predicted would happen (too lazy to try to find my post). I thought cash traffic would start declining in earnest sometime in the march-june period as former SN-plus-reliant grinders begin to realize they can't make it anymore without the subsidy and start dropping out one by one as their final reserves of both cash and optimism were drained. Unfortunately it appears that may be exactly whats happening.

At one point I was trying to familiarize myself with AYA's financials but I was already tens of hours into it, going to investopedia every other line and the general convoluted opacity of the whole thing got to be too much. But I think I learned enough of the basics to know this: if this recent trend of sharply declining cash traffic continues at all this company could be in major trouble on short order.

Any thoughts on the prospects of other verticals stepping in to save the day? Could AYA actually transition PS from being "we are poker" to "we have nothing whatsoever to do with poker" and stay ballin?

Sounds promising. Can you check the year-over-year numbers as well? That would take out the seasonal fluctuation.

I don't have access. I just look at the website, the yoy numbers I've quoted I've gotten from articles. But in Jan 2015 I believe daily avg was about 19k. Right now its 16K and apparently falling rapidly. What is the typical seasonal decline as percentage of avg daily Jan traffic, say for July?

My understanding from folks in the industry is that their offerings in other verticals are not up to the competition in those areas. Unless they can leverage their direct reach among their customer base, they have a tough row to hoe. Considering years of "poker only", it seems likely thatthose among their database who wanted casino or sports channels have already found them elsewhere, so the task is to win them back.

The problem created with PS rakeback program is that everybody thought they were going to be the next nanonoko so started excessively multi-tabling specifically to get rakeback, as opposed to focusing on the tables they were on, and trying to win money without rakeback, by winning pots.

Part of this is PS own fault as their own internal marketing was hocking this guy, who was seen playing 24 tables at a time. I remember the old PokerRoom.com restricting how many tables a user can play at one time. FTP and PS thought non-sense, unlimited multi-tabling! And well, there's your result.

I'm sorry guys, but PokerTracker and HUD doesn't replace manual observations. Actually, I'm not sorry, get a life.

u mad?

No way to un-see that, damn .....

Hey Judge,

A better indication of traffic is to check Pokerstars traffic here:

http://poker-network.flopturnriver.c...rs-Network.php

It is hourly and shows all traffic, not just cash game.

Stars traffic was pretty steady, except it started declining about a month or so ago. Non-Sunday daily peaks have gone from 175k to about 156-165k.

Also, 100k plus daily used to be about 10-11 hours a day, now it is about 7 hours a day.

However, this does not seem unique to Stars. 888 is down as well.

I thought it might be seasonal, but seasonal declines are usually 10-15% and start in April, not February.

I don't know the answer for the decrease in traffic, but it has not translated to overlays in the MTT's, nor has it affected the Spins, which have been pretty steady throughout 2016.

Regarding your question about the other verticals, casino traffic is quite good and sports betting has increased quite a lot since BetStars launched. There was a report out recently about BetStars traffic and it seemed to be doing pretty well.

I think that it won't be long before sports and casino overtake poker in terms of profitability. The markets are massive and Stars is offering some innovation in both verticals. Spin & Bet sounds cheesy, but it is catching on. Here are other differentiators in the works too. That's probably why Baazov wants to buy it now, the company will have killer cash flows in the next few years.

So more money down the toilet,while also destroying online poker,basically.
YAY!!

Not destroying per se, but making it less profitable for regs. After Stars did it, the other sites followed, so online poker as you knew it is dead.

As I said previously, if you're a rakeback grinder, your days are numbered. The only ones that will succeed are those that are incredibly good, those that are fine with a small(er) return, or those that make money from streaming.

Amaya wants to make pokerstars a source for entertainment rather than a career. I can't say I blame them, it is their site and they can run it how they see fit. They are under no obligation to be a source of employment for marginal poker players.

As for casino and sports, there are millions of players who enjoy watching a game while having money on it. I've been sports betting for 20 years. It's a source of entertainment for me, I am under no illusions that it will pay my bills. Same with casino, I sometimes play blackjack to unwind after a stressful day. If BetStars ever comes to Canada, I'll definitely check out the spin & bet.

NVG has a lot of people posting here so this may not be obvious to everyone: slr940 is very likely to be an Amaya shill. His first-ever post on 2+2 was a bizarre OP in NVG where he admitted to being new to online poker (and an occasional recreational player in general) and asked what online poker site he should play on (it was quickly locked). His second post, two months later in May 2015, talked about Amaya's stock price and how they were making a ton of money off poker and how their goal is to double the online poker market in five years. Then he took a took a seven-month hiatus and has been making pro-Amaya posts in several Amaya-centric threads since December 2015.

I can barely find any posts he has made that aren't involving Amaya/PokerStars. Here's one:
So, even if he's somehow not a shill, it's probably worth ignoring his La La Land antics anyway.

In before mods tell you he's not a shill and that youre not contributing to the discussion

there are ppl, who signed up lately, only post rubbish and try to attack amaya in every possible way ... there are ppl posting rubbish and 'promoting' a special poker room, whenever they can ... also shills of course.

truth is, it's the internet, where ppl have their own opinion and share them happily ... and while i believe, that a forum might be a good place to start some 'smear campaign' against a competitor, it seems a bit weird, that a poker room would invest any money/time to let non native speaking ppl promote a special cause ... especially if the impact is less than minimal.

seriously, let's talk about numbers ... how many users post itt 'regularly' or even read every information at all? even if a 'shill' could reach 500 users (which is more than doubtful), how many can be 'convinced' ... even if we would talk about 50 convinced ppl ... who cares, especially if there were decisions made, which are effect thousands of ppl.

seriously nvg tards not only believe, that the high volume grinders are the most 'loyal ones', but of course that they are the center of the poker universe. when the PS vip club discussion started in Nov, some ppl really believed this is the time for other poker rooms to welcome the masses of potential new customers ... you can check the 888 thread about the vip changes in the inet sub, if you want to know how this story evolved

tl;dr: it's a conspiracy

Can someone clear up to me how the following works? If Baazov wants to buy the company at C$21 a share which values it at 2.1 billion USD and Amaya has 2.6 billion USD in debt, does this mean they would have lost roughly 500 million from their initial investment? Or do profits from after the purchase offset this? Any other relevant factors?

Amaya was heralded as some sort of genius company for orchestrating the purchase but I'm trying to understand if the verdict has yet to be determined on whether it was actually a success. If they have a gigantic debt from the purchase, it seems to me that they need future success before they can claim any kind of success but perhaps I'm missing something here.

^ He would effectively be buying the debt with it so its already discounted in the price.

The back of the envelope calculation is that if the assets are worth 4.7 billion and liabilities are worth 2.6 billion then a fair price would be 2.1 billion.

(that's not to say I actually believe in the takeover attempt).

Pokerscout does actually track total traffic but not at that level of detail. Thanks for the link. I can't help but to start thinking of Spins as almost chimeric given the frequency they're touted as the new first-rate PS flagship yet with a near total dearth of primary data on them. Why is AYA so tight lipped?

There is data available on Spins, but not from Stars. There's a poster on this forum called Spinmerightround who posted a link to spinlyzer.com. You can check out the daily Spin volume there - it's a freemium service.

The only downside is that it shows Spin traffic from $15 and up. I would be curious to see volume for the $.50, $1, $7, but their system doesn't show that data unfortunately.