blonde poker forum

I do not want to take the spotlight off Mr Rutter's splendid news, so I started a different Thread for this.

Did you spot this purler at the end of that Press Release?

"....After three successful years in partnership with Blue Square Poker, the Tour this year welcomes a new sponsor in gcasino. com, the online incarnation of the fastest growing casino brand in Britain, which will be the home of GUKPT online qualifiers.....".

How extraordinary!

Note that both companies - Blue Square & Grosvenor - are in common ownership, & share a common Office I think.

1) Why on EARTH would the Parent company support 2 almost identical companies, thus halving the value & benefit of the promotional spend?

2) What does this mean for Blue Square?

Intriguing.

Jamie - wanna share anything with us?

Wich network will/is gcasino running on ?

I thought they were abandoning the Blue Square brand and just sticking with gcasino

They are both on iPoker.

Its a good question Tikay, I could understand if they were rebranding to GCasino, as obviously that is the recognised brand for the live part of their operation. I presume GCasino is one of those sub-skin thingies, so I presume the costs are lower than running a normal skin.

Agreed Barry. But the Sponsors of the splendid & successful GUKPT Tour were Blue Square. Now it's GCasino. com.

That's my curiosity, & I'm not being in any way critical of anything. Just interested.

Will the excellent Mr Raab still be involved?

Is it possibly that preparation is being made for one day the assets of Rank not being under the same ownership?

I mean you have G Casino/Grosvenor..UK market leader, plenty of assets, returns protected by gambling acts largely preventing new competition...but which had no online asset to promote its "offer". Give it www.gcasino.com through which it can cross-promote to what must be a substantial mailing list of members containing pretty much anyone who is interested in playing Poker in the UK, and online casino games.....

and all of a sudden if the day came when Blue Square was no longer part of rank, for whatever reason, then the G Casino online brand is up and running...increasing one assumes the value of G Casinos overall

The GUKPT could not function without Mr Raab, imo.

But I don't believe he works for Blue Square these days - he works for Grosvenor. Who own Blue Square & GCasino com. ;)

Decoded = they might sell Blue Square?

No idea, but not sure why you'd have two online brands and drop one as the sponsor of your flagship events and create another with extra cost, customer confusion likely, mixed marketing messages and so on.

I was going applaud you for being eagle-eyed Tony, but then I remembered that this message had already been communicated more prominently in the main GUKPT press release from Jon on Monday...  ;)

The main reason for this really is to make the link between the live Tour and the online poker product as seamless as possible.  As marketing budget decreased from the launch year of the GUKPT with TV coverage etc, making people aware of the link between the GUKPT and Blue Square became more difficult - especially when the Grosvenor and G brands got thrown into the mix.

The majority of the GUKPT events are now held in G Casinos, and we have only recently launched a smart new online casino under the same brand.  It made sense to harness the marketing activity around this to include the GUKPT as well and launch a new G Casino Poker product.  This will make it much easier to convert live players online to a brand that they are already familiar with - rather than push them to Blue Square which they may not be aware of or understand the link.

Blue Square has always been predominantly a sportsbook brand and will continue to exist as such - with poker remaining one of the additional products offered to that customer base.  It will continue to host GUKPT qualifiers alongside the new G Casino Poker brand, and in terms of promotions etc. they will both offer the same range of rewards and offers.  The only difference will be where new players are recruited from.

Thank you! Perfectly explained, & all wholly logical.

Presumably Blue Square as an Online Poker Room will now gradually be wound down, with the players migrated to GCasino com.

Inevitable, I suppose. I have had many happy times there, especially in the Tribeca days.

Doubt it just another brand.

So my G Casino you can earn loyalty points inside (I have enough for a pint right now) can we align our GCasino online account with our live GCasino account (so I can save up for two pints)?

That is certainly the plan.  However the Points Scheme hasn't rolled out across all the live casinos yet so the data geeks may take a little while to hook it up online as well.

Hopefully I'll be able to arrange some sort of interim solution though, where Points earned online can be converted for local tourno entries or food/drink vouchers etc.

I did mean to congratulate you on such a splendid choice of guy in Mr Rutter. I've been trying to think of someone who would have better fitted the role - that's tough. I can only think of, maybe, just 2 players, one of whom is not available. A perfect candidate, well done.

But I can't be so praiseworthy of the mixed messages I am getting as to where Blue Square & GCasino.com "fit". It makes no sense to me at all. They are, after all, in the same ownership. I can only assume that the long-tem plan is to go with one or the other. Nothing else would make any sense.

Is Gcasino/com also in i-Poker? If so, I feel for them. God help them if they have winning players.

I think it is pretty common for a company to have more than one brand and market them in different ways.  Remember that the vast majority of people are unaware that the two brands are even owned by the same company.  Even the Mecca Bingo relationship is more obvious with so many clubs now located next to G Casinos.

You are right in a way though as once the gcasino.com poker product launches you will rarely hear the words "Blue Square" and "poker" associated with each other any more - unless you happen to be a sportsbook customer that we are cross-promoting our additional products to.  The primary poker outward-facing brand in the business will instead be gcasino.com and will be marketed as such.

That doesn't mean Blue Square Poker will disappear though.  We get huge numbers of new accounts every day through the sportsbook and will continue to promote the poker product to these customers, plus continuing to deliver the same service and range of games to existing players.

I suppose in a simplistic way you could label Blue Square Poker as the brand aimed at new/casual players going forward, with G Casino Poker aimed at those who already know/play the game and have aspirations to play in bigger events such as the GUKPT in conjunction with the live casino partnership.

Well I wish you luck with that!