Yahoo Poker Review

Yahoo Poker Online Cardroom

On April 26, 2007, Yahoo! Inc. announced plans to open a real-money poker cardroom under the Yahoo Poker brand according to a report on the CardPlayer magazine website. This could be considered the first time that a company as large and powerful as Yahoo has entered the online poker space, so the implications for the industry could be considerable. The poker site is being launched in cooperation with Boss Media AB, a Swedish company which provides "white-label" poker solutions for a variety of brands, including several sportsbooks.

A poker card room will complement Yahoo's UK-Ireland partnering with Betfair to begin accepting online sports and other wagers using Betfair's popular exchange betting platform.

Yahoo enjoys almost 40% of the total Internet traffic in the UK. Thus, its entry into the online real-money poker cardroom business will present stiff competition to the rapidly growing number of cardrooms offering poker games online. Yahoo's entry could result in becoming a top-five poker room, even though Yahoo almost surely will not accept players from the United States, who comprise an estimated 60% of the volume in existing online cardrooms.

This could signal the entry of other large companies in the space, including websites like Google, MSN, and eBay, all of whom have tremendous user bases from which they could draw players.