Home / Poker News August 2009 / World Poker Tour sold to Gamynia Limited
World Poker Tour sold to Gamynia Limited
Posted by: James Carter. - Sat, 2009-08-08 10:16
The World Poker Tour (or WPT) no longer exists as we knew it. Gamynia Limited, a privately owned investment group, has recently walked into the picture, offering to pay $9,075,000 for all of WPT Enterprises’ assets, including its sponsorship, licensing, television and distribution departments. Gamynia will also share a percentage of its WPT-related future revenues with WPT Enterprises.
The deal is as good as inked, and while it is still pending the approval of the majority of WPT Enterprises stock-holders, the fact is that Gamynia has already agreed with around 39% of voters, so the outcome is highly likely to be a positive one.
The move will mean that another power player will rear its head in the online gaming market. To make its intentions clear, Gamynia has already agreed with Hardway Investments Ltd. regarding cooperation in the field of online marketing. Hardway Investments have worked with several high-profile online gambling operations, most notably with Titan Poker.
Gamynia committed itself to acquiring one of the most popular poker brands, in the hopes of forwarding its agenda both in the verticals it’s already established in and in online gaming.
WPT Enterprises will not fold either. It will give up its television library in the deal, but it will continue to earn revenue from future sponsorship deals. The license of the WPT’s Seventh Season will remain with PokerStars and that of the PPT (Professional Poker Tour) with PartyGaming.
Furthermore, WPT Enterpises will keep its offices and staff and it will go into business in a different, not poker related vert, under a different name. Steven Lipscomb, CEO of WPT Enterprises has made it clear that the money obtained from the Gamynia deal will be used in acquiring or combining with companies with great untapped potential in various other fields of activity.
The completion of the transaction is expected for the fourth quarter of 2009, as a WPT Enterprises stockholders meeting is planned around that time.
Lipscomb didn’t miss the opportunity to point it out that the WPT was the catalyst for the 2003 explosion of poker popularity in the United States, a phenomenon which in turn gave birth to the global poker boom. The highly lucrative online poker industry has developed in the wake of this popularity explosion, for which the WPT was obviously partly responsible.
Though it never really managed to assert its presence in the online sector (its online poker room has recently been closed), the WPT carried its share of the load by bringing brick and mortar gambling establishments and online poker entities together, to cooperate in a manner that wasn’t just mutually beneficial, but which also achieved a lot for the game of poker in general. Gamynia is set to pick up the effort now, bringing a newfound marketing aggressiveness which may finally succeed in truly establishing the WPT brand online.
