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Johannesburg, South Africa, July 12, 2012 --(PR.com)-- For all of Red Flush's Apple device users, a revolution is coming to your iPhone, iPod and iPad soon. Thanks to new, fully-optimised mobile casino software, Apple gamers can now carry their fun with them for the very first time. This is a revolution in mobile casino entertainment: for the first time, Apple and tablet users have a whole new gaming platform specifically designed for their devices, so that they could get their game on anytime, anywhere.

Although online poker is a gold mine of data, until now nobody knows where the players and their money come from. It seems that the knowledge about the online poker market has not been able to keep up with the speed of its evolution in the past years. This paper is the first to shed light on this matter. We use data of 4,591,342 poker identities from the Online Poker Database of the University of Hamburg (OPD-UHH) collected over a six months period from 09/2009 to 03/2010. We find that the USA is still by far the biggest market with 1,428,823 active players and 650.5 million US$ net revenues in 2009. However, with regard to the number of internet users in a country Hungary is the biggest relative market: One out of 57 Hungarians with internet access plays online poker for real money. The two main drivers of the proportion of online poker players per internet users are GDP per capita and culture. Using the data from the OPD-UHH, future research will be able to break down the market also on a regional level within countries and to examine inter and intra country differences in the playing habits of online poker players.

In April, Wynn was in talks with Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), the world's largest social gaming developer, to form a strategic online partnership. (See our previous post: Wynn Takes Hard Look At Online Gambling Market With Zynga) Speculation is rife that Wynn is interested in partnering with Zynga for this project. Zynga enjoys a dominating position in the social gaming industry and has about 232 million average monthly active users across 166 countries.

"Social game developers have all the ingredients that the gambling guys are missing," Mr Griffin said. "They have good user experiences. They have a huge install base of a billion players, but they don't have access to monetisation." Betable has not announced any specific contracts, but said the platform could be used by the popular Facebook or social games like Zynga's Farmville.

"Even as Apple's storefront plays host to an increasing number of casino apps, the company isn't taking a cut of sales from gambling in its apps, Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, said. Games are permitted in the App Store as long as they comply with local laws, said Neumayr, who declined to comment specifically on Big Fish. "Apple wants to keep arms' length from this," said Paul Thelen, CEO of Big Fish. "They don't want to be the middleman in a gambling operation.""

Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, said in a conference call with analysts today that the company will launch its first real-money online gambling poker game in the first half of 2013. The game will likely be launched outside the U.S., since real-money online gambling is still illegal in the vast majority of states. There are regulatory roadblocks in many countries, but Europe is pretty open. Pincus said the launch will be subject to online gambling regulatory reviews. Zynga's non-real-money poker game, Zynga Poker, accounted for 18 percent of revenue. In that game, users purchase poker chips with real money, but they cannot cash out any winnings

Zynga has announced the release in early 2013 of its poker application that will involve real-money gaming. Over the past year, Zynga has struggled to keep its foothold in the mobile gaming market as new entrants have entered the industry. Zynga's solution: real-money poker, which is set to launch in the first half of 2013 in international markets. Zynga's latest quarterly earnings report - its sales of $332.5 million missed the $343.1 million mark that Bloomberg had forecasted - sent the company's stocks plummeting as low as $3.03 per share on Wednesday. At the end of today's trading Zynga's stock price sat at $3.17 per share, but has dropped even further in after-hours trading. During the earnings conference call, Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus blamed Zynga's second quarter shortcomings on Facebook. Changes to Facebook's algorithm apparently surfaces fewer games, thereby decreasing the frequency with which Facebook users discover Zynga games.

"We think it's an interesting adjacency to what we do in our core business," he said, in an interview with TheStreet. "We also have an interesting asset in Zynga Poker, which is one of the world's largest online game, with over 30 million monthly users.