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Cereus Victory as Pokerlistings buy Cake
The poker rumour mill has been in overdrive this week but finally the slow death of the Cake Poker Network maybe reversed …
PokerListings.com the poker portal has announced that they have bought a 50% stake in the US Friendly Cake Poker Network.
When Sportsbook and Players Only left the Cake Poker Network to join Merge Network (taking alot of fish with them) and then the announcement that Doylesroom was leaving to join / takeover the Yatahay Network everyone knew that that something would have to happen to get Cake out of a hole.
With alot of rumours flying around for the last couple of months, it seemed most likely Merge Gaming would buy the Cake Network outright but that didnt come to pass.
PokerListings has picked up a 50% share in the Cake Poker Network (CPN) read press release here. One of the biggest complete online poker guides Poker Listings is also one of the biggest poker affiliates in the business, owing several other large poker portals, giving it huge clout in the market and a profitable player base to direct to poker sites.
It was clear something was going on when 2 of PokerListings top 5 sites were not only on the Cake Network but also they were offering a bigger non standard bonus. It all makes sense now, with the deal they now have an obligation to supply at least 2000 new depositing players a month to CPN via their portals.
That a poker affiliate portal has moved into the running of a poker network or at least buying a very big share of it isn’t really a big surprise, many of the big affiliate operations are actually bigger than many of the smaller poker sites and networks.
Its a near certainty that with the increased traffic and injection of new players pokerlistings can provide it will undoubtedly get Cake back on track but it’s sure to cause a stir in the industry with many affiliates and sites hesitant about sending players to a network part owned by a powerful competitor.
As well as unsettled affiliates it’s likely to have other advertising and promoted poker rooms reassessing their relationship with pokerlistings if Cake skins are inevitiably going to get higher positions due to the strategic partnership.
Most importantly of all from a players perspective it calls into question just how objective they can be comparing sites if they now have such a vested interest in the success of those on the cake network.
Almost immediately after Pokerlistings confirmed they had bought 50% interest in Cake Poker Network, Victory Poker a skin on the network announced they would be moving to Cereus, home of UB.com and Absolute Poker.
This will be the 3rd network move for Victory Poker which is far from ideal however it does represent something of a landmark moment for the Cereus Network which has until now really only been a network in name.
Previously consisting only of stable mates UB.com (formerly UltimateBet) and Absolute Poker owned by the same company the Cereus Network always seemed to be nothing more than a rebranding excercise in the light of the superuser account issues on both sites. Now a completely separate poker room has been accepted on the network it maybe signals that Cereus might get taken more seriously as a potentially massive US facing option to challenge the big two.
Cake Poker is the flagship of the Cake Network and is open to US players.
Featuring softer games than some of the bigger USA friendly sites it has solid software and a good Gold Chips VIP points program with a reasonable range of tournaments.
Peak players: 1,200
Easy Win: 7/10
• Visit Cake Poker
Network: Cake Poker Network
US players: Yes
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