Home / Poker News January 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – PartyGaming Involved in Megaupload Scandal
The Poker Grapevine – PartyGaming Involved in Megaupload Scandal
Posted by: Randy Williams - Sun, 2012-01-22 12:46
The Megaupload and Megavideo takedowns as well as the arrests made in the case have been all over the news for the last couple of days. What is surprising for the online poker community is though that PartyGaming (the parent company behind
PartyPoker) was apparently also involved in the scheme which generated around $42 million every year for Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom. PartyGaming was one of the clients that advertised at the site, paying about $3 million a year for these services. Exactly what this means for PartyGaming in legal terms now that the operation based on piracy was busted, is unclear. Google’s Adsense and adBrite were also involved with Megaupload advertising.
In other news: Zynga has apparently reversed its position on real money online poker. As the largest manufacturer of online games in the world and owner of the largest online poker network, Zynga was obviously intrigued by the possibility of real money online poker being legalized in the US. According to a company spokesperson, Zynga is now looking for ways to enter the US online poker scene once the game gets legalized and regulated. According to the same source, Zynga’s poker players are indeed interested in playing for real money and this player interest is apparently what prompted the company to mull the idea in the first-place. Conversations with potential partners are already in progress.
In still other news:
PokerStars’ first ever TCOOP (Turbo Championship of Online Poker) is in full swing, having kicked off last Thursday. The first day of the series hosted 4 events, each of which played down to a winner extremely fast. The good news was that each and every one of the inaugural events managed to handily beat the guarantee. The first event beat all expectations, drawing a starting field of 44,787 players. The winner collected $67.9k in this one.
The second event featured a slightly larger buy-in and thus only 4,337 players registered for it. The third and 4th events attracted 5,561 and 9,877 players respectively.
