PartyGaming’s online poker site, Party Poker, saw its share price drop another 13 percent on Tuesday, prompting analysts to suggest that its withdrawal from the US market in the wake of new US gambling law, may have accounted for a 90 percent drop in revenue.

Following its exit from the US market the company also made the decision to remove a ticker from the site which advertised the number of virtual tables in use and the number of players online.

Comparing Saturday night’s poker traffic with the previous week, Panmure Gordon’s Ivor Jones revealed, ‘Our very tentative estimate would be that rake and tournament fees would have been down more than 80%. Real money play appears to have picked up sharply at the poker sites which continue to operate in the US.’

A spokesperson for PartyGaming said the player and table number tickers had been removed because it did not want rival operators to use this information against it. One such rival, Israeli-owned PokerStars, has already begun an aggressive recruitment campaign in an attempt to leapfrog PartyGaming as the world’s largest poker operator.

Julian Easthope, a UBS analyst, said, ‘Liquidity drives revenues and PartyGaming will more than likely lose its market leading position.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Online Poker, Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.