PokerShares to cease operations in 2022
The platform that priced up poker players and reduced staking markups will no longer offer action from March 2022.
Mike McDonald's poker betting and staking platform PokerShares is closing down in 2022.
The site was essentially a sports betting platform where poker fans could bet on poker players in major tournaments as if they were staking them. It also allowed bets on big poker stories, for example the Polk vs Negreanu heads-up match.
After five years the site has decided to call it a day:
After 5 great years of pioneering as the bookmaker for all things poker we will stop offering bets on poker events and cease our operations. PokerShares will not be offering any more betting markets as of January 2022. All our users will have until March 31st 2022 to cash out their balances.
It has been a rewarding experience to help make the poker staking market more efficient, give fans at home more skin in the game, and allow the community to have a better perspective on how the market tends to rank various players.
As time has progressed our team has grown more focussed on other ventures, and grown further removed from the ins and outs of top-level poker, as well as found regulatory limitations have limited our ability to continue growing our business effectively.
Making poker staking more efficient
PokerShares was originally conceived in response to what McDonald felt was overpriced markups in the poker staking community. He would often undercut actual poker player staking requests with what he felt were more accurate markups. As the statement above suggests, PokerShares no doubt played a role in making poker staking markets more efficient.
In other news, Phil Galfond's poker room Run It Once has also announced it is ceasing operations in the EU market, instead opting to focus on the US market instead:
The end of 2021 will, coincidentally, mark the end of an era for @RunItOncePoker, while the start of 2022 marks the beginning of a new one.
More details here: https://t.co/GTxlFBWwP1
— Phil Galfond (@PhilGalfond) December 30, 2021
Gameplay will stop today and players have until April 3 to withdraw their balances.
Did you use PokerShares? Let us know in the comments:
