- “Sky Poker Powered by PokerStars” suggests that the platform will close, players will be moved over to PokerStars, but the brand will be retained.
- The site launched in February 2007 and for over ten years has managed to maintain a small independent room.
- It was supported by Sky Poker TV, broadcast on its own Sky satellite channel for nearly a decade.
Online gaming giant The Stars Group has confirmed that it plans to migrate the recently acquired Sky Poker onto its PokerStars online poker platform.
It follows the successful acquisition of Sky Betting and Gaming (SBG), which includes the Sky Bet and Casino brands, as well as the smaller bingo and poker sites. The decision to shut Sky Poker would mean the closure of the independent online poker room and mark the end of the platform with over a decade of history.
“Of course, the aim is to obviously migrate the Sky Poker business into the PokerStars [business],” said Rafi Ashkenazi, The Stars Group CEO, on a conference call to investors earlier this month. “So something along the lines of 'Sky Poker Powered by PokerStars’ is something that we are definitely looking at for the UK business.”
The decision to migrate Sky Poker over to the PokerStars platform is not surprising. As PRO predicted back in April when the SBG acquisition was first announced, it would be only logical to fold Sky Poker into the superior PokerStars platform, “potentially as a separate skin sharing the same player pool,” as reported at the time.
