Online Poker Rooms Reliance on NETeller Could Prove Costly
With the late Wednesday night announcement that NETeller will be leaving the US market for good a number of online poker rooms have been left with their pants down, though few were offering strip poker tournaments.
Over the past few years many online poker rooms and gambling sites in general have become increasingly dependent on third party payment processor, NETeller.
For Full Tilt Poker that dependency was somewhere around 75% according to records obtained by Gambling911.com. The number three online poker site was in danger of losing out to other poker venues less reliant on NETeller.
For the largest poker site, PokerStars, the dependency on NETeller was quite a bit less, hovering around 60%, though the site is double the size of Full Tilt. On Wednesday, PokerStars had 2 1/2 times the amount of real cash players than Full Tilt.
Point-Spreads.com first reported NETeller's decision Wednesday. Bodog.com, one of the last operators to adopt NETeller instead focusing on ACH and EFT, has already discontinued the use of NETeller as a payment option and is one of a handful of operators that did not rely heavily on NETeller.
"Bodog is not at all dependent on NETeller as they have retained their own eCom capabilities," an industry analyst told Gambling911.com. Bodog has since confirmed they are fully integrated with their own payment platforms.
A significant portion of online gambling companies have relied heavily on NETeller for both its convenience and price.
"The price to set up your own internet commerce system will run a company in the thousands of dollars," our analyst said. "In the end, many of these gambling sites would have saved significant amounts of money by not losing so many customers."
Full Tilt, meanwhile, has one public relations firm fuming.
According to Codeworx 2 Pty Ltd, Fox Sports made all players wearing the logos of poker rooms remove their clothing and change into plain clothes, UNLESS they were wearing approved logos.
Those on the approved list were sites such as www.pokerstars.net and www.fulltiltpoker.net.
"To make the approved list there had to be absolutely no access to online gaming from the URL that is shown," the representative told Gambling911.com. "According to the Fox Sports floor manager, these sites went through a stringent approval process and passed.
"If you type in www.pokerstars.net you are taken to their play money site and it would seem you can't get to real money.
"www.fulltiltpoker.net is another story altogether. When you click on that link you get re-directed straight to www.fulltiltpoker.com, clearly flying in the face of this apparent approval process they went through.
This was brought to the attention of Crown Casino 2 days ago, and we had hoped the redirect would at least be switched off, however this was not the case. Clearly either Crown did not inform Fox, or Fox didn't care.
"I attempted to get contact details for Fox from Crown Casino but they refused, promising to take the issue up with Fox themselves."
Fox's own rules state that a company with online gaming cannot be shown on their broadcasts, and most poker rooms have taken steps to set up legitimate .net URL's with no links to real money poker.
"Full Tilt is clearly in breach of this rule, and it would appear that at this point no-one seems to care."
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Christopher Costigan, www.gambling911.com
Originally published January 18, 2007 12:49 am ET
