Former stockholders of the World Poker Tour (WPT) have found success in a different line of business since selling the brand to Party Gaming for $12.3 million back in November. The company, which now goes by the name Ante4 Inc., became an energy corporation in April and has seen its share price more than double in less than a month.
Former WPT chief executive Steve Lipscomb told stockholders that he was planning to use the cash windfall from the sale of the popular tour to Party Gaming to enter a new type of business. On April 16th, the company merged with an oil leasing firm in Billings, Montana to form Voyager Oil and Gas.
The company has already seen its share price skyrocket since the merger. Former professional poker player Lyle Berman, who served as Chairman of the WPT and holds the same position at Voyager, said if the company had distributed the $28 million in divestiture profits to shareholders, it would have equaled about $1.40 per share. Voyager shares went from $1.40 at the time of the merger to about $3.20 earlier this month.
“We thought if we could find a company with a great business model that needed cash, the stock would trade significantly above $1.40,” Berman said in an interview with the L.A. Business Journal. “We have fulfilled that mission.”
Lipscomb, Berman, and Berman’s son, Bradley, have no prior experience in the oil business, but will serve on the board of Voyager. They hired investment banks in Los Angeles and Minneapolis to find merger opportunities and eventually settled on the Montana energy company, then called Plains Energy Acquisition. None of the three principles will have any day-to-day responsibilities for running the company.
Two men, J.R. Reger and Mitchell Thompson, are currently running Voyager. They work out of the company’s headquarters, which is being moved from Wilshire Boulevard on the Miracle Mile to Billings.
Since being purchased by Party Gaming last November, the WPT has seen its numbers continue to decline dramatically. The final event of the tour’s eighth season, the $25,000 WPT Championship, took place last month and drew a field of just 195 entrants, down from 353 in 2009. David Williams earned $1,530,537 in prize money by winning the event this year, compared to a first place payout of $2,149,960 to 2009 winner Yevgeniy “Jovial Gent” Timoshenko.
The falloff is due in part to the presence of competition like the PokerStars North American Poker Tour (NAPT), which is thriving in its first season, as well as the already popular PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT). While the WPT Championship lured the smallest number of entrants since the tour’s first season, the EPT attracted 1,239 players for its tournament in San Remo, Italy, won by UB.com pro Liv Boeree for €1,250,000. The event was the largest in the history of the EPT.
Meanwhile, the NAPT drew 716 players for its most recent Main Event at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. Vanessa Selbst earned $750,000 for the title.
