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PARTYPOKER.COM: MAKING POKER FUN ACCESSIBLE TO MILLIONS

PartyPoker.com is the world's largest poker room. With more than 35,000 simultaneous players during peak traffic time every day, Partypoker.com is larger than all of the land-based poker rooms in the world put together. That is no insignificant achievement considering the site only launched in August 2001.

Known for its highly innovative marketing strategies that attract both new and experienced poker players, PartyPoker.com is the blockbuster success story of online gaming. With the incredible upsurge in poker around the world, greatly driven by televised poker, the online poker rooms may actually be the biggest winners. While bricks-and-mortar poker rooms have seen a 40 percent increase in the past year, online gaming has jumped 500-600 percent, but PartyPoker.com has rocketed a whopping 1500 percent.

Through a combination of aggressive marketing and robust technology, PartyPoker.com has managed to garner more than 50% of the global poker market share. Players at the PartyPoker.com site have in excess of 5,000 tables to choose from every day, plus large-scale tournaments that are held on the site weekly. Currently, the weekly tournament prize pools run more than $2.5 million. A key to the company’s growth has been the creation of the simplest user interface in poker, designed to be appealing to even the most technology- challenged and intimidated individuals. PartyPoker.com offers 24/7 customer care by phone, email and instant messaging.

Vikrant Bhargava, General Manager, likens PartyPoker.com to a major online stock exchange. “We’re in the business of providing the liquidity to the market by enabling a large number of people to bet against each other, just like in the stock market,” he says. “You invest based on your knowledge and on your hunches, take your winnings and reinvest again. As the “house,” we take a small part of the transaction, just like your stock broker.”

Right from the very beginning, PartyPoker.com has been a major success. The company is managed by alumni from top business and technology schools. Ironically, none of them come from a poker background, but they have applied their skills to build a very successful e-commerce operation. The management team takes its “poker” input from a panel of highly experienced consultants from the poker world. That panel includes World Poker Tour commentator Mike Sexton; the “First Lady of Poker” Linda Johnson, who is a highly respected poker player as well as successful businesswoman, and Andy Glazer, a well-known poker author.

In March 2002, PartyPoker.com staged its first major offline tournament, bringing together many of its leading players who had won their way into the event via satellite tournaments. The first PartyPoker.com Million was held on a cruise ship and paved the way for an annual event. The inaugural tournament guaranteed a first prize of $1 million, making it larger than any other limit tournament in the world. The tournament was also historic, as it was the first major won by a female poker player – Kathy Liebert.

PartyPoker.com has come a long way since the first PartyPoker.com Million. Qualifying rounds for the PartyPoker.com Million III are currently being conducted on the site, and PartyPoker.com has chartered the MS Ryndam cruise ship to host this year’s mega $3.7-million dollar prize-pool event. The ship sails on March 13, 2004.

The privately-held PartyPoker.com is licensed and regulated by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in Quebec, Canada. Its software has been audited and certified by BMM International, a leading casino software testing firm. PartyPoker.com’s workforce is truly international (seven nationalities), with more than 500 of its employees based in Hyderabad, India (home to large operations for GE, Dell, Deloitte and HSBC).