- “It’s important to have the ecology of the cash rooms as clean as possible, so there’s been a clean-up there—things like bots.”
- Last year, the company embarked on a network-wide effort to clamp down on bots and cheaters at the online poker tables.
- The company seized $180,000 from cheaters in both July and August this year.
- September was much lower, and the company expects poker to return to growth in Q4.
According to GVC, parent company of partypoker, its ongoing efforts to clean up the poker games by banning bots had a material impact on revenue from its “gaming” segment of its product portfolio in the third quarter of the year.
Over the last ten months, partypoker has confiscated and reimbursed over $1 million seized from over 600 accounts of bots and cheaters found at its online poker room.
In a trading update last week, GVC reported total revenue across its entire online portfolio grew 16% in Q3 2019, with its “games” brands—which includes partypoker, Foxy Bingo, Gala and Casino Club—grew 8%.
While this came in lower than prior reporting periods—in H1 2019, it grew 17% on a proforma basis—the company welcomed the results, pointing to unfavorable comparatives with the World Cup in 2018 that dampened numbers.
On the analysts’ call, CEO Kenneth Alexander further expanded on the trends underpinning the data. Alongside the World Cup, online poker was primarily to blame, he stated.
“We’ve communicated this before. We’ve cleaned up the ecology of the cash rooms on the partypoker business,” he said. “That was mainly as a result of giving cash games a bigger push.”
