Party Poker down...time to short sell + buy back?

[DcifrThs]

so party poker is likely losing a day's worth of rake.

i proposed in MHL that we should short on monday open on LSE and buy back quickly if nobody is selling to cover.

but probably some irrational trading will occur and thus be exploitable.

in order to research this position, id like to see PP's open short interest over time since its IPO...

i have a few other research questions but i'll start with this one for now.

Barron

[Sniper]

Party was down for the release of some major upgrades!

[DcifrThs]

well what i initially thought was an outage or server issue has turned out to be a conscious choice as we've all seen.

id like to see the financial estimates that engendered this change. makes sense intuitively though...

interesting to see how (the the conclusion) they:

1) included the future costs of court/litigious outomes

2) looked past the 1-1.5 year timeframe, and under what assumptions.

3) estimated the overall effect on the player pool

4) estimated the overall effect on individual player contribution

5) estimated the overall effect of new features to rake back contribution

interesting development for sure.

Barron

[fnord_too]

What interests me is this:

IIRC Party has downgraded growth forecasts twice due to the poker market slowing down. So, just going by this and not doing any real research myself, let's say the poker playing population has leveled off and there are roughly as many people leaving the game as coming in. What do you think the lifespan of the average player is? 3 months? six months? I don't think losing players play too long on average, though I could be wrong.

So if that is the case, then the turn over in online poker is pretty damn high, which makes the large customer base at party less of strangle hold on dominance.

I really think when US casinos are allowed to enter the market they will force a lot of change. One casino (Foxwoods, maybe?) I heard was already starting to enter the market, but you had to set up the account and deposit money on site.

What I would like to see is for a few networks/independant sites to use a comon third party to hold the money so one could have one on line bankroll that could play at any site/network.

I think point 1 is huge. I think party is at risk for shareholder suits (probably unjustified, but who knows) and skin suits (again, who knows how those contracts are written).

[Sniper]

[ QUOTE ]
So, just going by this and not doing any real research myself, let's say the poker playing population has leveled off and there are roughly as many people leaving the game as coming in.

[/ QUOTE ]

We have not yet reached this point... Party's growth rate was 81% in the first 6 months of 2005, compared to 89% in the first 6 months of 2004.

[ QUOTE ]
I think party is at risk for shareholder suits (probably unjustified, but who knows) and skin suits (again, who knows how those contracts are written).

[/ QUOTE ]

The shareholders will benefit from this action. I wouldn't place any money on a bet that the skins were going to sue either.