When Bwin merged with Party Gaming in April 2011, the Ongame Poker Network which is owned by Bwin became redundant. Bwin customers are still a part of the Ongame network but the expectation for Bwin was that its customers would eventually move to the more popular Party Poker product. As a result of the merger, Bwin announced that Ongame was surplus and was looking for a company to take it over. The company apparently offered the product to most of the skins including Coral and Betfair but none of the companies were interested. After all, Betfair already tried to run a stand alone poker product but moved to Ongame since it couldn’t generate sufficient traffic on its own. Moreover, many customers at Coral and Betfair apparently haven’t been too thrilled with the poker product due to frequent timeouts among other issues and have launched numerous complaints. Consequently, Coral has apparently been looking for a chance to get out of its contract when it can.

In March of this year, Bwin’s wishes were finally realized when Shuffle Master, a company most noted for its creation of the automatic card shuffler announced that it was going to purchase Ongame for about $25 million. Shuffle Master believed that their expertise would allow them to create major innovations to the product and make Ongame more attractive to potential skins worldwide. However, the deal fell through in the last 2 months and Ongame is back on the table. Shuffle Master cited a decreasing interest in poker in Europe and an uncertain U.S. poker market for their decision but sources close to the company informed me that it had more to do with the decision of existing skins to pull out once the company is sold as the main stumbling block. As well, Shuffle Master thought that Ongame could be an attractive option stateside for casinos in New Jersey, Nevada, California and any other state that wants to offer online poker but the interest apparently wasn’t there. Caesars has its own product, Party Gaming has already set up partnerships and PokerStars is back in play with yesterday’s arrangement. Although the announcement wasn’t made until yesterday, it was well known in the industry that any agreement with the DoJ would require PokerStars to be able to operate unimpeded in the U.S. market when online poker was legalized and regulated.

According to sources, the company that apparently is now interested in Ongame is Zynga, the social media games provider that runs on Facebook. As was mentioned in a recent article, Zynga is planning on starting a real money poker site in 2013 and Ongame could provide the turnkey operation they’re looking for. $25 million to Zynga is peanuts and sources say that it allows Zynga to avoid all the legal headaches associated with creating a whole new operation from scratch. Ongame currently has a license in Gibraltar and many of the staff was instrumental in creating Party Pokers iPhone app. If Ongame was simply sold then Zynga wouldn’t have to go through as many hassles as they would if they had to find a jurisdiction to accept them, file all the legal papers and create a new brand name. As well since Ongame never operated in the United States there wouldn’t be an issue if Zynga ever decided to offer a real money gaming operation under the name in the U.S.

It’s uncertain when the announcement will be made but sources say it will be settled by the end of the summer. In fact Coral and the other skins apparently have been talking to iPoker and Microgaming in anticipation for the announcement when they’ll need to find a new provider.

Contact Hartley via email at Hartley[at]osga[dot]com.

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