Harrah's All Geared Up For Poker Site Launch

It's seems like old news, with speculation running rife since April this year, but now its official...Harrah's have formerly hired ex PartyGaming CEO Mitch Garber and are soon to launch an online poker site.

Garber will head a new Harrah's subsidiary with a mandate to leverage the World Series Poker brand with a new online poker site. The site will initially target jurisdictions where online poker has been legalized, such as the United Kingdom and Italy. But there is no doubt that Garber and Harrah's will have their sights set firmly on soon taking nets from American players.

Harrah's contributed over $400,000 to lobbying efforts in support of Barney Frank's newly introduced Bill which would, if passed by Congress, would repeal the current Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act and pave the way for licensed US customer facing operators.

"I do think the time has come, particularly for online poker," Loveman said. "It is a very exciting and very lucrative business and we are going to work hard to convince elected officials that this is something American adults should be able to do", says Harrah's CEO.

And just to make sure Harrah's are ready if and when the new laws come into effect they will be very soon launching a free play poker portal, leveraging the WSOP brand they own and building a customer base that they can migrate to real money play when possible.

It is likely the new site's launch will coincide with the running of this year's WSOP due to start at the Rio next week. The event drew almost 60,000 entries last year and paid $180 million in prize money. This year's event is likely to be bigger again, despite global economic woes.

It will be very interesting to see just how quickly Harrah's can make inroads into the current online market, with savvy operators like Full Tilt and PartyGaming clearly satisfying their rapidly growing player bases. That may be one reason why they hired an ex PartyGaming executive.