Blog

On Friday, Flutter published its third quarter trading report which has showed impressive results for most of its business.

Reports of Paddy Power-Betfair online grew by 14%, Sky Betting and Gaming (SBG) — by 26% and Australian company BetEasy — 76%, thanks to a significant increase in sports interest in the third quarter.

Overall, the group's total revenue grew by 27% to £1.33bn in the third quarter, with both the sports betting segment and the rest of the fields showing significant growth.

However, the soft spot in the report turned out to be... PokerStars. Moreover, annual revenues of the Stars have not changed, on the contrary, they even grew slightly (by 5% to £262 million). However, this was facilitated by significant growth in casinos of 32%.
 As for poker, PokerStars' problems are partly related to its sudden decision made in August to leave a number of Asian markets (including the Chinese one). This decision is associated with PokerStars' reluctance to be present in the "gray" markets, where the fight against money laundering, imperfect legislation and problems over the control of gambling addiction are not properly resolved.

But there is another interesting thing: The Stars Group are used to blame… GGPoker which has strengthened significantly due to the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and forced TSG to invest more in marketing which negatively affected the company's reports in terms of poker success.