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Friday, June 24, 2005
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Revealed: free video poker game partners and certain winners in £4.8bn net float Ian Cobain on the secretive but colourful entrepreneurs behind PartyGaming Thursday It is the biggest flotation on the London stock market for years, an event that is expected to unleash a wave of interest in poker, and which is raising the spectre of a second dotcom bubble. When PartyGaming, the company behind the world's biggest poker website, is listed on June 27, it will be valued at £4.76bn. With the countdown under way, adverts for the PartyPoker website have been blazoned across the pages of the national press and on the sides of taxis, asking: "Got a bad poker face?" Article continues
Amid this brouhaha, however, the people behind PartyGaming are not showing a straight poker face. In fact, some of them are not showing any face at all. Ruth Parasol, mother, lawyer, former internet porn princess and the company's founder, is zealously protecting her privacy. She steadfastly refuses to give interviews. The picture of her taken more than 20 years ago for her high school yearbook and seen here for the first time, is thought to be the only one ever published. Even her PR advisers concede that she is a "slightly mysterious" woman. That, they say, is how she likes it. "They are not seeking publicity and prefer to continue to lead private lives," a spokesman says. It is inevitable, however, that the float has generated interest in Ms Parasol's unusual family history and her colourful career in the cybersex industry. There is also a growing awareness that, while her activities are legal in the UK, as far as the US justice department is concerned what she is doing is completely illegal. Ms Parasol, 38, appears to have begun lowering her profile some time before the float was announced this month, since when she has not been seen at her home in Marin county, north of San Francisco. She had resigned her membership of the state's Bar Association a few days earlier, as had her husband, a lawyer and software entrepreneur called James Russell DeLeon. PartyGaming is registered in Gibraltar, with headquarters in a 14-storey office block overlooking the harbour that is also home to the territory's trade and industry ministry and its financial services commission. Some of PartyGaming's computer servers are also there - beyond the reach of law enforcement officials in the US. Tax advantages In preparing for the float, the couple are thought to have joined Gibraltar's burgeoning band of so-called Hinwis, the "high net-worth individuals" who have acquired residence status. Although becoming a Hinwi brings enormous tax advantages, there is no need for the couple to actually reside in Gibraltar, and few on the Rock have seen them. Regardless of where they live, what is certain is that between them, Ms Parasol and Mr DeLeon, 39, own 40% of the company. And that means that in a few days' time they will be worth, on paper, almost a couple of billion pounds. To put this in perspective, Martha Lane Fox was hailed as the ultimate dotcom heroine when the flotation of lastminute.com five years ago brought her a notional fortune of £51m. Ms Parasol will be worth almost 20 times as much. Her business partner, Anurag Dikshit, 33, an Indian computing wizard who owns 42% and will be worth around £2bn, is keeping an equally low profile, although his picture does appear on the company's website. The only man with a substantial stake in PartyGaming who is happy to appear in public is Vikrant Bhargava, 32, Mr Dikshit's old friend from the Indian Institute of Technology and the group's marketing director. But it is Ms Parasol who has enthralled the City and triggered the most animated media interest - and who appears to have gone to the greatest lengths to protect her privacy. The man who taught her much of what she knows about the porn industry, e-commerce, and the importance of playing her cards close to her chest, was her father. Richard Parasol, 73, is understood to be a Holocaust survivor and former Israeli army officer who settled in San Francisco around 50 years ago. He is thought to have worked in the construction industry and dabbled in property, but by the early 1970s he was the proprietor of a string of massage parlours in the Tenderloin, the city's edgy red-light district. Robert Mojica, the one-time owner of a rival massage parlour, recalls: "He had a whole bunch of them. I think he had a topless bar too." He admiringly describes Mr Parasol as "a real hustler". Business was good, and by the following decade Mr Parasol had moved his Swedish wife Gunna, his daughter Ruth, and her two younger sisters out of San Francisco and into Marin county. The beautiful and affluent hill country north of the Golden Gate Bridge has long been the capital of America's liberal counterculture, a place whose inhabitants were recently written off by George Bush as "misguided Marin county hot-tubbers". Yet even here, Richard Parasol could raise a few eyebrows. Some people in the town of San Rafael recall him cruising around in a red Cadillac convertible while stripped to the waist. "Very interesting family," says one old neighbour. "A little smarter than everyone else," ventures another. Mr Parasol still lives in one of the wealthier corners of Marin, in a large white house with a small stars-and-stripes flag fluttering from the locked gates. The Guardian has been unable to contact him for comment. Ruth, said by neighbours to be "a more serious person" than her father, was educated at a private high school before studying at San Francisco University and reading law at Western State University, south of Los Angeles. Although qualified as a lawyer, it is unclear whether she ever practised, because shortly after leaving law school she went into business with her father, who by then was running sex chatlines. By 1994 she had two of her own chatlines, called WKP and SPR. Some say Richard Parasol gave them to his daughter to help her make her own way in the world of adult entertainment. Father and daughter also invested in an internet pornography company called the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which offered live video clips of striptease shows to subscription-only websites with such names as Virtual Girl and SeXXXvision. At one point, IEG renovated a warehouse in Seattle where 14 young women, working in shifts, performed before video cameras in any one of four stage sets resembling a bedroom, a health club, a shower and a dungeon. As well as paying to watch them disrobe, punters could call the warehouse on premium rate phone lines and put their special requests to the women. The dungeon, apparently, was particularly popular among the online subscribers - and highly profitable - in the small hours of the morning. Ms Parasol's spokesman says she and her father had withdrawn from IEG by mid-1996, and that she has severed her connections with the internet pornography industry. Realising the astronomical profits to be made from online gambling, she and her husband launched PartyGaming the following year. Mr Dikshit and Mr Bhargava were brought on board, and the company's cash cow, the PartyPoker.com website, was born. The business grew rapidly, and at peak times there are now 80,000 people playing on the site's virtual poker tables. By taking a small slice from each bet, PartyGaming has generated vast revenue: this year it is expecting an operating profit of £275m. Legalistic quibbles The announcement that PartyGaming was floating in London did not escape the attentions of the justice department, however. Supporters of online gambling in the US maintain that it is perfectly legal, and insist that those who disagree are misinterpreting the law. The justice department has no time for such legalistic quibbles: it has warned that online gambling operators are in breach of three federal laws, and may be arrested and prosecuted in the US. American gamblers, who generate 85% of the company's revenue, are not breaking US laws by placing bets on PartyPoker. With the justice department unable to prosecute the company as long as it remains offshore, officials say they have been looking at ways of targeting US support companies, such as advertising agencies. PartyGaming's spokesman said yesterday: "Like many other countries, the US does not have legislation specifically regulating online gaming and therefore there is uncertainty as to its legality. The company operates from and is licensed by the government of Gibraltar to carry on its online gaming business all over the world. The company's activities are therefore lawful under Gibraltar law." The company also cast doubt on the justice department's legal analysis of the legislation. Concern over the legal position of PartyGaming in the US is causing nervousness among would-be investors. Many had expected the flotation price to be around £5.5bn and, when it fell to between £4.4bn and £5.1bn yesterday, the company rejected claims that it was cutting the price in response to those jitters, insisting that the sum was a "realistic assessment" of its worth. Another threat to PartyGaming is looming in Congress, where Jon Kyl, a Republican senator from Arizona and long-time opponent of internet gambling, is proposing a bill which would prohibit banks and credit card companies from allowing US customers to use their accounts for online bets. One of Ms Parasol's many admirers in the US, the Manhattan-based online gambling consultant Marc Lesnick, compares the legal uncertainty to the Prohibition era, and says Ms Parasol is bringing the American people what they want in the face of official opposition that must, eventually, crumble. "It's like rum-running in the good old days," he says. Perhaps Ms Parasol is gambling on an end to the New Prohibition, hoping that the legal position will be clarified, that the justice department will back off, and that she will be free to return to enjoy her many millions in the green hills of Marin. Who is making what · Ruth Parasol and her husband, Russ DeLeon, are to receive about £375m jointly in cash from selling shares. Their remaining stake will be worth £1.5bn · Parasol's co-founder, Anurag Dikshit, who wrote the original software, is to receive same amounts for himself · The marketing director, Vikrant Bhargava, is to sell shares worth £107m. His remaining stake will be worth £426m · The company's chief executive, Richard Segal, a former Odeon boss, is to sell shares worth £9.5m after a year in the job. His remaining share options will be worth £38m · The finance director, Martin Weingold, is to sell shares worth £3.8m. His remaining options will be worth £15.2m · The part-time chairman,Michael Jackson of the software group Sage, is to be given £1.5m to buy shares
posted by free video poker at 5:09 AM  
Sunday, June 12, 2005
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Expert Play In Video Poker April 17, 2005 Whenever I write about video poker payback percentages, I add the cautionary phrase "with expert play." Jacks or Better with a 9-6 pay table, meaning full houses pay 9-for-1 and flushes 6-for-1, will return an average of 99.5 percent of coins wagered to players, with expert play. Most players don't play at expert level, so their returns will be a few percent lower. But just what is "expert play?" The question pops up from time to time, as it did recently in an e-mail I received from a reader. Well, determining what play is "expert" for a given hand means weighing all possible holds, all possible results, and picking the one that will bring the highest average return. There is no one "expert play" method that covers all video poker games. Each change in the pay table changes the odds of the game. Expert play is different for Jacks or Better than for Double Bonus Poker or Deuces Wild. Even within the same game, expert strategy changes with pay tables --- 9-7 Double Bonus Poker has some key strategy differences from 9-6 Double Bonus. I can't detail all the nuances of expert strategy in one column --- I spent 270 pages picking apart strategy differences in my Video Poker Answer Book. But what we can do is try a few sample hands to show how expert play works. Let's start with a hand that we play one way in Jacks or Better, but differently in Double Bonus Poker. Say we're dealt 5-5-6-7-8 of mixed suits. We have two reasonable draws --- either we hold the pair of 5s, or we hold 5-6-7-8 and hope for a straight. In either game, holding the four-card straight leaves 47 potential draws, with 39 losers and eight straights with any of the four 4s or four 9s. Holding the pair of 5s leaves 16,125 possible draws, with 11,559 losers, 2,592 that will leave us with two pair, 1,854 that give us three of a kind, 165 full houses and 45 four of a kind draws. So if the potential outcomes are the same, why do we change strategies from game to game? Because the rewards are different. In Jacks of Better, two pair pays 2-for-1, while in Double Bonus two pair pays only 1-for-1. That makes holding a low pair, with loads of two-pair potential, more valuable in Jacks or Better. On the other hand, Jacks or Better pays only 4-for-1 on straights, while most Double Bonus games pay 5-for-1. (If you find a Double Bonus machine that pays only 4-for-1 on straights, don't play it.) If we're playing 9-6 Jacks or Better, holding the pair earns us an average return of 4.12 coins per five wagered, while holding the four-card straight brings us 3.40 coins. But in 9-7 Double Bonus, holding the four-card straight brings an average return of 4.26 coins, while holding the low pair brings only 3.67. Expert play is to hold the pair in Jacks or Better, but to hold the small straight in Double Bonus as long as the straight pays 5-for-1. Without going into quite so much detail, let's look at a couple more examples. In Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker, where two pair pays 2-for-1, we wouldn't think of breaking up two pair to chase something bigger. But in Double Double Bonus Poker, where two pair drops to 1-for-1 and we have a chance at a 2,000-coin bonanza if we draw four Aces with a 2, 3, or 4 as the fifth card, we'll keep a pair of Aces while discarding a second pair. It's not a close call in either case. In 9-6 Jacks or Better, dealt Ace-Ace-8-8-4, we'll average a return of 12.98 coins per five wagered by holding both pairs, but only 7.70 for holding the Aces alone. In 9-6 Double Double Bonus, we get back an average of 9.58 coins by holding just the Aces, and 8.40 for keeping both pairs. One more. In full-pay Deuces Wild, available mainly in Nevada with occasional sightings on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, four of a kind pays 5-for-1 and full houses 3-for-1. In that game, we break up two pair, keeping just one twosome, and hope for four of a kind. Average return is 2.81 coins if we hold just one pair, and 2.55 if we hold both. But in most of the country, the best Deuces versions we can hope for are the "Not So Ugly" and "Illinois" Deuces games that pay 4-for-1 on either four of a kind or full houses. (Truth told, those games are now more common even in Nevada than the full-pay version.) That makes holding both pairs for a better chance at a full house more valuable. Our average return becomes 3.4 coins for holding both pairs, or 2.74 for holding just one pair. Expert strategy is not something to master overnight, or something one person can master for all games and all pay tables. If you want to play like an expert, pick a favorite game or games, then put in your bookwork and practice on the computer before you play.
posted by free video poker at 1:22 AM
Thursday, May 26, 2005
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Video Poker Cuts Into Charitable GivingApril 5, 2005 Where there is gambling, there are losers. And as video poker bars continue to sprout across West Virginia, the losers are increasingly likely to include a group of people that lawmakers tried to protect when they passed the Limited Video Lottery Act of 2001. Nonprofit fraternal organizations like the Elks and the Veterans of Foreign Wars say they're losing so much money that they can no longer support charities the way they once did. Bob Doyle, quartermaster of VFW Post 9916, used to allocate $30,000 to $40,000 a year for local youth groups and charities. This year, the post will give half that amount. "When this law first started, six businesses in Westover had about 30 machines. Now there are 18 businesses," he says. "The market is saturated. Every town is polluted with them." Legislators "wanted to make them less visible," adds Miles Epling, state commander of the American Legion, "and they did exactly the opposite." The law legalized 9,000 new video poker machines like those that had long gone unregulated and untaxed. Though for-profit operators were allowed to operate five machines at a single site, legislators decided fraternals could have 10. But many fraternals now complain that intended advantage is being undercut by high tax rates that range from 38 percent to 52 percent, declining interest in traditional games and the proliferation of neighborhood clubs. The Lottery Commission says fraternal organizations have 1,351 machines in 185 locations across West Virginia. In all, there are 7,625 machines in 1,614 locations. Bingo and raffles used to be lucrative revenue sources for fraternal organizations. However, as the number of video poker machines increased, profits from the traditional games dropped off. The state doesn't track how much fraternals make on video poker machines. Figures from the state Division of Tax and Revenue, however, show gross receipts from bingo fell from $29.9 million in 2003 to $28.4 million in 2004. Raffle sales dropped more dramatically, from $124.6 million in 2003 to $96.7 million last year. "People have got stars in their eyes with the machines," says Gary Nisewarner, administrator of Moose Lodge 120 in Martinsburg. "They can win $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on a machine, but you can only win $100 off a tip jar. So where would you rather spend your $10?" The Legislature could help by giving fraternals a tax break, argues Bob Pirner, a spokesman for SteppingStones, a nonprofit group that relies on private donations to provide recreational services to about 1,500 disabled people in north-central West Virginia. "Organizations like the Westover VFW are generous," Pirner says. "With those kinds of organizations, you know the money is going to help out local communities. "With these little casinos that have popped up, where is the money going? It's not going to the community. It's going into their pockets." Linda Lugar, executive director of the Beckley-based United Way of Southern West Virginia, says one Eagles club gave $20,000 in 1999. That dropped to $5,000 by 2003, and last year, the club donated only $700. The United Way supports 28 charities in Raleigh, Fayette, Nicholas and Summers counties, and Lugar says it feels the loss. Now, she says, charities coordinate fund-raisers "so not everyone is asking for money at the same time." George Sinkewitz, finance officer of Ceredo-Kenova American Legion Post 93, says his post gave nearly $200,000 to charities in 2002 and only $120,000 in 2004. Now, after taxes, most fraternals split their profits with operators who lease the machines. Sinkewitz wishes legislators would consider a rate cut but doesn't expect it "because they seem to be basing everything in the state on gambling revenue." Lawmakers could be reluctant to change the law for another reason. Last summer, Sen. Vic Sprouse, R-Kanawha, complained that groups with no members and no history of charitable giving have begun incorporating as fraternals to cash in on the extra machines. He called the practice "borderline fraudulent" and wants the loophole closed. But that could have ramifications for legitimate fraternals like Elks Lodge 1452 in Beckley, a small post that gives about $2,500 a year to charity. Secretary Clay Walker says it depends on the $30,000 a year it makes from the slots. "We wouldn't be able to keep this lodge open if we didn't have the machines," he says. "It keeps us afloat."
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Monday, May 16, 2005
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Sunday, May 15, 2005
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Guests who sign up for a new Total Rewards Card or already have one but never have visited Harrah's Louisiana Downs are eligible to receive up to $50 of their slot losses reimbursed. Play for at least one hour with a Total Rewards Card properly inserted in any slot machine and get reimbursed for your losses up to $50, with a minimum $10 loss, via a voucher in the mail to redeem during your next visit to Harrah's. Stop by the Total Rewards Center for more details.Harrah's is celebrating the first anniversary of its slot casino by giving away cash at the Harrah's Birthday Bash Saturday. To enter the giveaway, play any of the slot and free video poker machines with your Total Rewards Card properly inserted or swipe your card at the Promotions Desk beginning at 10 a.m. the day of the party. Every 30 minutes from noon to 9:30 p.m, five Total Rewards members will win $100. At 11:30 p.m., 10 more members will win $250 each.
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Thursday, May 12, 2005
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Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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