PokerStars is all in on sports betting.
After signing up at Sky Poker you will be awarded £10 in tournament tokens (2 x £2.20 tokens and 2 x £3.30 tokens). You are also entitled to a first deposit bonus of 200% up to £500. You release your bonus by earning poker points, your bonus will be released in £10 increments for every 250 poker points earned.
The online site’s parent company announced Saturday that it has agreed to acquire Sky Betting & Gaming from private equity firm CVC Capital Partners and the British media company Sky in a cash and stock transaction valued at $4.7 billion. The merger will result in the “world’s largest publicly listed online gaming company”, according to the Stars Group, formerly known as Amaya Gaming Group.
Paddy power roulette minimum bet. Amaya bought PokerStars in 2014 for $4.9 billion.
“The acquisition of SBG is a landmark moment in the Stars Group’s history,” company CEO Rafi Ashkenazi said in a statement. “SBG operates one of the world’s fastest growing sportsbooks and is one of the U.K.’s leading gaming providers. SBG’s premier sports betting product is the ideal complement to our industry-leading poker platform. The ability to offer two low-cost acquisition channels of this magnitude provides the Stars Group with great growth potential.”
Ashkenazi added that the Stars Group will become 'the world’s favorite iGaming destination” under the deal. The company said it identified cost synergies of at least $70 million per year.
Despite its strong global presence, PokerStars is licensed in just one U.S. jurisdiction for online betting (New Jersey), and the platform is currently shut out of online poker liquidity sharing with Nevada because it doesn’t have interactive gaming approval from Las Vegas casino regulators. In 2015, PokerStars launched an offshoot offering called BetStars, a sports betting product that could soon find a place in the U.S. if the Supreme Court this year overturns a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada. Acquiring SBG bolsters PokerStars’ fledgling sports betting business. In 2016, Amaya’s deal to merge with William Hill, another sports betting juggernaut, fell through.
SBG is currently home to the United Kingdom’s largest active online player base, according to the Stars Group. The U.K. is the world’s largest regulated online gambling market.
The Stars Group will soon rely on poker less than ever before. According to the news release, poker could eventually represent about a third of the company’s gambling winnings going forward thanks to the acquisition of SBG. PokerStars had revenue of $877 million in 2017 from real-money poker games, a small increase over 2016. The poker revenue was 67 percent of the group’s total gambling winnings last year, down from roughly 73 percent in 2016.
The company’s emerging online sportsbook offerings saw its active user base grow by 27 in the fourth quarter of 2017. The SBG deal is expected to continue the growth.
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The news release also said that Stars has obtained “fully committed” debt financing of about $7 billion. About $3.6 billion of the purchase price will come in the form of cash, with the rest coming from newly-issued shares. Some of the financing will go towards paying off SBG’s debt.
The Stars Group ended 2017 with about $283 million in operational cash on its balance sheet.
The group’s board of directors unanimously approved the transaction. The company anticipates the transaction closing in the third quarter of 2018.
SKY MOBILE POKER - £10 COMPLETELY FREE
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SKY POKER INTRODUCTION
DOWNLOAD & WELOME BONUS
If you're new to Sky Poker there's an exclusive “newbies” deal just for you - £10 free and a 200 percent first deposit matched bonus up to a maximum of £500. As always, such deals come complete with conditions. The £10 actually consists of four Sit & Go tournament tickets: 2 x £2.20 tickets and 2 x £3.30 tickets. The tickets can be combined to provide entry to more expensive tournaments if you so wish. Your deposit bonus is released in £10 chunks every time you amass 250 poker points while playing at Sky Poker. You earn six points for every £1 earned playing ring games, and ten points for every £1 you spend in tournament fees – both MTTs and Sit & Gos. You have 30 days from being awarded the bonus to claim as much of it as you can.
INTERFACE & FEATURES
When you've logged into the website, you can pick from three poker variants, namely Hold'em, Omaha (Hi) and Omaha Hi-Lo. Oddly, there are no tables with more than six places available – indeed you can only play 6max or Heads-Up. Players looking for 9max or greater will need to play on the desktop site.
You have two ways of finding a suitable table at which to play. You can find your way into the Sky Poker lobby and browse around the tables that are available. The browser function within the app is actually pretty neat. Alternatively, you can just set up your game type, table type (6max or HU) and stakes (Micro, Low, Medium or High) then press the large pink “Play Now” button. The app will then find a free table for you which matches your chosen criteria, and you can choose to be seated if the table is to your liking.
The app still has some issues – the biggest being that the whole poker experience via mobile is conducted in complete silence. This is a bit of an issue if you want to play poker while doing something else as well, as you need to alerted when it's your turn to act. Additionally, the poker client is not yet optimised for tablets, and players have complained that once you enter a MTT or Sit & Go via the app it can be hard to actually get to and sit down at the table.
Sky say they are working on these issues, but you can't help but feeling they would have been better placed to make a more functional app before releasing it to the poker playing public.
TABLE MODE & COMPETITION
The table display is fine, and the fact there are only 6max and HU tables available means that the table display never becomes cluttered. The cards are easy to see and if you are playing on a smaller mobile screen you can switch to a four-colour deck. The interface is less easy to use on smaller mobiles, particularly if you want to micro-manage your bets down to the exact cent. Players on mobile screens may have to be content with the default options of ½ pot, ¾ pot, pot and all-in as even small fingers have difficulty in using the bet-size slider, which can lead to random bet values being played.
The game play is pretty slick, although there is just a hint that the players are a little slow to react. Some players have complained of more bugs, such as the first round of betting started without the cards being dealt, and the app freezing completely at times. Again, a little more beta-testing might have been a good idea from Sky before the app was released.
One other point – once you're seated at a table you cannot “nip back” into the lobby without quitting the current table you are playing at.
COMPETITION
On the other side of the coin while the Hold'em ring games at Sky have plenty of players, the MTTs, Sit and Gos and Omaha variants do not. If you are looking for anything other than ring games, then you'll probably find Sky Poker a little frustrating.