article on party/ be prepared

[PokerHorse]

You gotta know when to hold ’em By Brett Arends Monday, October 24, 2005 - Updated: 02:19 AM EST Boston Herald
Have you heard about the high-flying Fidelity fund managers who dropped more than $2 million last month in an underground poker game in London? The managers: Tokuyo Sano, Ben Paton and Wilson Wong of Fidelity's International Small Cap Fund. The game: online poker. In particular, the IPO of PartyGaming, the parent company of monster online poker site PartyPoker.com. The chips are still on the table, but it's not looking good. According to Bloomberg data, their fund's stake was worth $6 million at the start of September. Today that's nearly halved. It's interesting to see Ned Johnson, chairman of the fund's trustees, overseeing this wager. PartyPoker has 416,000 active customers. But nine tenths, or an estimated 370,000, are in the U.S., where it may be operating illegally. That's not my view. It's the government's – and the company's. The IPO prospectus actually warns that the company, and its bosses, face ``a significant risk (of) criminal or civil judgments'' over their U.S. operations. ``The Group's activities in the US are considered to be illegal by the Department of Justice and certain other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,'' it says. U.S. marshals have already seized company cash. Fidelity declined to comment on the matter. Maybe the fund managers just got carried away. According to the prospectus, in three years PartyPoker's registered customers skyrocketed from 105,000 to 6.6 million. Pretax profits, just $2.1 million in 2002, hit $360 million last year. Revenues are soaring. But you need to double-check the hole cards before moving your chips into the center. And buried in the 200-page document are some fascinating insights into the online poker craze. Out of every 100 customers who join Party Poker, just 15 ever play a game for money. Another 10 drop out within a year. A small group of hard-core gamblers provide most of the business. And with nearly half the market, the company is sitting there like a fat target. Rivals are already offering people cash to switch. No wonder Party Poker needs to spend heavily to get and keep customers. Costs rose 800 percent between 2002 and 2004, and jumped another 29 percent through the first quarter. Profit growth slowed dramatically. Poker is hot right now. You can barely turn on a TV without seeing another green felt table surrounded by grim-faced professionals or ``celebrities'' of deteriorating quality. The jargon's everywhere: The flop. The river. Fourth street. Bad Beat. There's one more to remember. Jumping the shark. The time will come when the craze dies and poker subsides back to a natural constituency. Party Poker says revenue per player per day is now actually falling. The stock has plunged since the founders and staff cashed out nearly $2 billion in July's IPO. The old rule of thumb is that the stock market tends to anticipate events nine months ahead. Which means Celebrity Poker could be starring George Hamilton and TV's Rerun Undead as early as next spring.










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[Freudian]

Sweet copy-and-paste skills, sir.

The links don't work.

But it was still worth it for this funny line:
[ QUOTE ]
The old rule of thumb is that the stock market tends to anticipate events nine months ahead.

[/ QUOTE ]
Pure humor.

[obsidian]

[ QUOTE ]
Out of every 100 customers who join Party Poker, just 15 ever play a game for money. Another 10 drop out within a year. A small group of hard-core gamblers provide most of the business.

[/ QUOTE ]
And people say us multi-tablers mean nothing to party.

[jj_frap]

Here's a solution.

Eliminate the authoritarian prats who think it's cute to shove their bullshit morality down our intellectually superiour throats and support anti-gambling laws.

Gambling should be regulated to prevent corruption and only to prevent corruption.

[O Doyle Rules]

A small group of hard-core gamblers provide most of the business.


I would not call us a small group, while it is true we are a very small percentage of the total players out there, we make up the bulk of online poker's profit.

I would prefer to think of us as a small, but potentially powerful group.

[ QUOTE ]
Here's a solution.

Eliminate the authoritarian prats who think it's cute to shove their bullshit morality down our intellectually superiour throats and support anti-gambling laws.

Gambling should be regulated to prevent corruption and only to prevent corruption.

[/ QUOTE ]

A Libertine - One who acts without moral restraint.