PokerShare To Rise Again

Just as Empire Online and PartyGaming recently settled their legal dispute out of court, so now have online poker room PokerShare and its network software partner, Excapsa. PokerShare is set to rejoin the ranks of the living in March and promises to be better than it was before.

PokerShare.com opened in August 2005 as a novel concept, one where through their play, players would actually own a piece of the company. Dividends would be distributed quarterly, and if the poker room were ever to go public, which it had planned on doing, those with pieces of the company would also be granted stock.

Problems started within just a couple months, as PokerShare started drawing players away from Ultimate Bet. Because the two were on the same poker network, Excapsa, customers felt comfortable moving from the established Ultimate Bet to the fledgling PokerShare, as the look, feel, and traffic would be the same. But now, they’d be earning share points in addition to any other bonuses and winnings.

This did not sit well with Ultimate Bet, as it was the big dog in the network. It was the poker room that controlled Excapsa’s North American market, and now PokerShare was intruding. Excapsa made the sudden and surprising move to not allow Americans to patron PokerShare. Shortly thereafter, the network stopped supporting it’s young poker room altogether, forcing PokerShare to shutdown in November.

PokerShare contended that because Excapsa cut off the rights to its poker platform and support, it had to cease operations and earlier this month, sued Excapsa and Ultimate Bet.

The poker room has stated that all of its real money customers will have their various rewards reinstated, including a cash balance in their accounts.

Below is an open letter from PokerShare’s poker room manager, Max Wright, as posted on the company’s website:

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I’m pleased to tell you that Playit Ownit Limited, the company behind PokerShare.com has announced that it has amicably settled the dispute with Excapsa Software and Game Theory Limited. This means PokerShare.com will be back, bigger and better!

I’d personally like to apologize on behalf of PokerShare.com for the lack of communication over the last few weeks and months, I can assure you that this was at our lawyers’ request, not because we’d forgotten about you!

PokerShare.com will be back in March 2006, I can assure you that we haven’t been sitting back with our feet up, we’ve been looking for ways to improve our software and we’ve found it! We have a great new partner, mouthwatering promotions and a WSOP schedule that you simply can’t afford to miss!

If you’re an existing real money player, you’ll have all of your existing Share Points and a cash balance waiting for you when you come home! For those of you that are new, I’m sure you’ll shortly find out that there’s no better place to play poker online.

We’ll be sending you further details over the coming weeks so that you know exactly what we’re up to!

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone for their messages of support, they mean a great deal to the team at PokerShare.com and we’ve tried to listen to every request. I look forward to seeing you all on the tables and hope that you’ll check back soon to play on the most generous poker website.

Kind regards,
Max Wright

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Originally published February 23, 2006