POKERCHAMPS SOLD TO BETFAIR
| Date | October 2005 |
| Price | $15,000,000 |
| Asset | PokerChamps |
| Buyer |  |
| Status | Closed. Player base merged with Betfair |
| Software | Yes |
| Success |  |
Betfair was the third major sports book that acquired a poker network. Unlike the predecessors Betfair bought PokerChamps to become a stand-alone poker room.
PokerChamps was known as Home of Gus Hansen who was the first player to win 3 WPT titles.
The poker pro Gus Hansen was not involved in the development of PokerChamps. It was mainly a group of Danish poker players together with a Danish software company called Aglet Technologies that was the driving force behind PokerChamps.
PokerChamps was the first poker room to make all players affiliates. It was a tiered system in ten layers so you earned money from all your friends, their friends and so on. Everyone received rake back and it was controlled by the network and paid weekly.
We do not deny Gus Hansen brought value to the brand. It goes without saying that having one of the most popular poker players in the world to represent PokerChamps had an impact on its success and gave it credibility.
Famous poker players are often hired to endorse a poker room or given shares in a poker room to help build the brand in the poker community and gain recognition among the genral public and the high rollers.
We are fully aware that Betfair is a sports exchange and not a traditional sports book however we have put Betfair in same category as the mastodons Sportingbet & Bwin.
Betfair left the Cryptologic network to use its own software which started a domino effect and eventually became the downfall of Cryptologic who closed down and merged its skins with IPN. The software of PokerChamps is no longer in use.
The brand PokerChamps was eliminated and the players were merged with betfair. Betfair could not get the necessary liquidity to operate as an independent poker room. We have given the success rate 1 star since Betfair had to exclude all Americans immediately, struggled for years to grow the network only to finally close doors and join Ongame. All the money and efforts spend on the PokerChamps project must be considered a failure and only Betfair knows how many millions that was lost.
1 betfair.com 31 October, 2005