Empire Poker Buys Noble Poker

Empire Online, operator of the popular online poker room, Empire Poker, announced today that it will purchase the intellectual property and brand of growing competitor, Noble Poker. Empire will take over the marketing of Noble, which is the largest poker room on the iPoker network.

Empire Poker is significantly larger than Noble Poker, the former being what is referred to as a “skin” of online poker giant, Party Poker. With this “skin” arrangement, Empire shares the same players and same tables as Party, but the customers who play at Empire see a different front-end interface than do the players who go through Party. At any given time, there are 25,000 to over 70,000 players logged into Empire Poker.

Noble Poker, on the other hand, is very small, still working hard to see 1,000 players online at once. The poker operator has been very aggressive in recent months, however, offering substantial signup bonuses and lucrative promotions.

Empire Online will also be acquiring Club Dice, an online casino operator, which is made up of Club Dice Casino, MonacoGold Casino, Carnival Casino, and YouBingo. Club Dice currently has over 70,000 registered real-money players.

Both Club Dice and Noble Poker use the Playtech software platform, a fact which very well may have factored into the purchase decisions.

Recently, PartyGaming, owner of Party Poker, went public, and has so far reaped the rewards. Before doing so, the company began policing its “skins,” including Empire Poker, much more strictly. For instance, a common promotional deal used to attract high-volume players is known as “rakeback” or “rake rebate”. In this arrangement, the poker room gives a percentage of the rake a player generates back to the customer as a reward for continued play. Party Poker never allowed these types of arrangements, but its skins did. In what many people believe was a housekeeping move to prepare its floatation, Party made its skins stop offering rakeback.

This no doubt frustrated Empire Poker, as rakeback was a great way to win profitable customers. After all, if Empire and Party are exactly the same to the player, except for the look, a strong incentive can be the difference maker when the player chooses which site to frequent.

Is this diversification effort an attempt by Empire Online to start breaking away from the Party Poker….”empire”? Possibly. It appears that the financial markets liked the move, as Empire Online’s stock price was up over 5% on the day.

The total purchase price of both entities is approximately $40 million.

Originally published August 1, 2005