About a month ago, Yahoo launched its play money Texas Hold’em poker game. In another month, it will be gone. The online portal and search engine that has seemingly been around as long as the internet itself recently announced that it is eliminating all Classic Yahoo Parlor games, effective at the start of 2015. Those games include its new poker offering.
Yahoo caused a stir in late October when it unveiled Yahoo Poker, a free Texas Hold’em game on its Yahoo Games site. At the same time, it began advertising on its fantasy football page, obviously trying to attract the core male demographic that it believes would want to try out a little poker. Fantasy sports have been huge on Yahoo for years (it was the go-to site before ESPN.com made the meat of its fantasy content, including leagues, free), so there are plenty of eyeballs that have seen the ads.
While Yahoo Poker has been purely a play money venture, some saw its introduction and heavy cross-promotion as a way to build a player base for the eventual legalization of real money online poker in the U.S. on a federal level. While of course not all play money players would convert to real money, but with the size of the player base Yahoo could potentially develop, just a small percentage trying it for real could be very profitable.
But now Yahoo is pulling the plug on the game. On its Games Help page, Yahoo explained why all of the Classic Games are being shelved, saying, “In January 2014, changes in supporting technologies and increased security requirements for our Yahoo web pages made it impossible to keep the games running. Following these technological advancements, the old parlor games were incompatible, insecure, and no longer functioning correctly.”
Forbes.com’s Marc Edelman wrote on Monday that this might not be quite true, saying he was e-mailed by Sean Hamel, PR Manger for Yahoo Games, who told him they have been removed in “efforts to streamline our product offerings and focus our energy and resources on developing for Yahoo’s core experiences.”
If what the Yahoo website says is true, many of the Classic Games could return once they are reworked. Whenever they come back, they will still all be free to play, but may offer players the opportunity to purchase “boosts” to give them an edge.
Yahoo actually had a real money site at one point, opening a UK poker room on the International Poker Network in 2007. As many sites had pulled out of the U.S. market after the passing of the Unlawful Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA), people got excited that a major web brand was starting a real money poker room, even if it was in another country. Alas, it never amounted to much.
