Hippodrome Casino Announces New Partnerships

The world’s largest online poker site is teaming with the UK’s largest casino for a deal to rebuild and expand local interest in poker.  Pokerstars.com has announced a deal with the Hippodrome Casino to rebrand the casino’s poker room with the PokerStars name and expand the size of the room to accommodate more tables and more players.

The Hippodrome only recently reopened this year after an extensive £40 million investment for upgrades to the aging design.  Located in London’s West End it is cited as one of the highest quality casinos in the UK if not all of Europe, and the deal with PokerStars hopes to drive even more players to the casino grounds.

The new poker room is expected to open in early 2013 where PokerStars will host many of its tournaments that continue to draw attention and viewership.  The tournaments will be promoted on PokerStars.com and there are expectations that they will also be televised to help build on the success of previous televised tournaments.

Guy Templar the Group Strategy Director for PokerStars has raved about the quality of the Hippodrome casino and believes offering a live poker feed inside the casino will have the same reach and effect as the tournaments found online at PokerStars website.

“We are looking forward to unveiling some great new live events for the UK poker market in 2013.”

The Hippodrome has also entered into a three way deal of sorts between PokerStars and Microgaming in a move to offer more online casino games inside the casino grounds.  The deal allows Microgaming to provide its software to run the online casino games while PokerStars will provide online poker using Hippodrome’s brand name.

Microgaming CEO Roger Raatgever says land based casinos have been working to incorporate online games for some time and that his company has been one of the leaders in blending the two.  He hopes that the deal with Hippodrome and PokerStars will help to generate greater traffic at the online games and provide opportunities for further integration of online and offline betting.