Amaya Gaming is expanding PokerStars to include table games and sports betting on a global basis.
Table games such as blackjack and roulette games are set to be rolled out on market-by-market basis starting this month.
Sports betting and other casino games will come in 2015. The company also plans a full-featured casino on mobile and web for next year.
PokerStars has already launched casino games in Spain via both the Pokerstars.es website and sister brand Full Tilt.
“We are taking the same principles, practices and integrity that make PokerStars such a successful and beloved brand and applying them to new verticals,” said Eric Hollreiser, head of corporate communications at PokerStars in a press release. “These new products will also support the development of poker and grow the overall business. We thoroughly researched the opportunity and spent a lot of time talking to players and analyzing the behavior of our customers on PokerStars.es and Full Tilt. Those launches have been successful in reactivating dormant customers and extending the value of our existing poker customers.”
PokerStars designed its blackjack and roulette games for poker players offering various social and betting features as well as unique multi-player games.
“We are confident these games will create more value to our PokerStars site and bolster the core poker offering,” Hollreiser said. “We are committed to extending our leadership in poker and will continue to serve the passionate online poker player, while expanding our reach into new audiences and new gaming opportunities.”
The decision has at least on casualty, however. Poker pro Victoria Coren Mitchel resigned as a PokerStars ambassador when the move to casino games was announced.
“I cannot professionally and publicly endorse it, even passively by silence with my name still over the shop,” Coren wrote on her blog. “Poker is the game I love, poker is what I signed up to promote.”
Coren says she objects to the unfavorable odds casinos players must face.
“I’m always careful to explain the difference between the essentially fair nature of poker, where we all take each other on with the same basic chance, and those casino games at unfavorable odds which can be (especially online) so dangerous for the vulnerable or desperate,” she wrote, sound much like Sheldon Adelson. “Although PokerStars assured me I would not have to actively promote the casino arm, I know in my heart that continuing in my current role could risk helping to send people to a place where they would encounter something I think is dangerous. That’s not the way I want to make a living.”
Hollreiser said the company understood her position.
“We’re sad to see Vicky go and remain thankful for her support of the game and the company and wish her success in poker and in life,” he tweeted.
