Land-based Vegas casino business South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa has claimed that it’ll be the first to offer real-money online play as early as this September. eGR North America report that CEO Michael Gaughan is confident that if South Point Poker’s licence is approved by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB), next month it will be ready for the off. That’s because an independent testing lab has already ok’d the product and other than “a few little issues”, as Gaughan put it, they’ll be ready to go live as soon as they’re approved.
“We’re finishing up our second wave of testing and so far no problems,” he said. “I may not be the biggest or the best but hopefully I’ll have a head start by two or three months.”
South Point Poker was the first free-play site to go live last October, something that Gaughan revealed had been a “disappointing” experience as they failed to attract the amount of players they’d hoped for. Gaughan added that “a few more restrictions” are being placed on them as they’re first and it will be a “full-blown site in Nevada” when the year’s out.
Extortion-friendly poker tracking site PokerScout.com has started to track free-play hands. The site, infamous for their pursuit of Bodog, now tracks ring-game free-play stats for nine different sites and networks. Zynga tops the pile with an average of 120,400 ring game players per day, followed by PokerStars with a 7-day average of 24,800. Both sites dwarf the rest of the list, with PartyPoker taking third with 2,500. It’s unclear as to whether owner Dan Stewart is using “projected” figures for any of this and therefore which ones are the real figures.
Zynga celebrated its position atop the chart by appointing the first female member to its board in the shape of former Yahoo executive Ellen Siminoff. Aftet the appointment, CEO Mark Pincus said: “Ellen has great experience and insights operating Web businesses at scale and brings a passion for consumer Internet products.”
