According to a report from the gaming industry website eGaming Review, PokerStars has named former 888.com official Gabi Campos as the new Chief Executive Officer for the online poker operation.
Campos comes from leadership of the 888.com subsidiary Dragonfish, a business to business (B2B) arm of the company. Campos left that position last month after the fiscal reports of the company were revealed to stockholders, stated eGaming Review. From those reports, Campos was in prime position to move to a larger company; 888’s fiscal numbers overall were down, but Campos’ Dragonfish provided approximately 20% of the revenues for 888 and increased the overall revenues of Dragonfish 33% in 2009 versus 2008.
Campos will step into the CEO slot at PokerStars on October 4th, but much of the original leadership of the company will remain the same. The founder of PokerStars, Isai Scheinberg, will remain as a major player in the organization as its Chief Technical Officer. Scheinberg’s son, Mark, will take up the role as Chairman of PokerStars.
eGaming Review reports that there was a special memo sent to the employees of PokerStars from Mark Scheinberg to ensure that there was a smooth transition in the company. eGaming Review published the memo, which stated, “Both Isai and myself will continue to be closely involved in the company’s strategic direction and building on the success we have all achieved together as a team over the last ten years. We are excited about this new chapter in the PokerStars story, and look forward to Gabi’s leadership in taking the company forward to continued success.”
What Campos’ exact position with the company will be is a bit of a mystery. As a privately owned company, there are no reports as to earnings from the market leader in the online poker industry. As such, there are no stockholders that a CEO would have to either push to buy more stock or shareholders that a CEO would have to soothe in lean times. Campos’ place as the new CEO at PokerStars may come in the public relations area. The online poker site has never had a person identified as the leader of the company; thus, it has a difficult time with public relations with its players and, especially, in the media.
As reported by Poker News Daily yesterday, the exposure of a bot ring in operation on PokerStars has been a very hotly contested issue. The popular poker forum Two Plus Two and the rankings site PokerTableRatings.com exposed the existence of a segment of players that were allegedly using bot programming on the site. A spokesman stated that PokerStars was aware of the situation and only ejected the players from the site after the allegations were made public on Two Plus Two and correlated by PokerTableRatings’ calculations. Having a face for the organization, such as a CEO would be, would have been helpful in alleviating customers’ fears in a very delicate area.
Since the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) in the United States in 2006, PokerStars has been virtually unchallenged because it still accepts players from the U.S., something that former leader PartyPoker and others weren’t able to do since they are publicly traded entities on various stock exchanges in Europe. Over the past four years, PokerStars has been able to build itself into a true behemoth in the online poker industry, leading second place Full Tilt Poker (another site still catering to U.S. players) by nearly a 2-1 margin in cash game player numbers according to PokerScout.com. With his prior success at Dragonfish, Campos should be able to make PokerStars an even more impressive player in the online poker industry.
