[StellarWind]

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PartyGaming also introduced a new acronym to the world in its release: EMEA. EMEA represents PartyGaming’s future as its most important market. The folks living in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), represent about 80 percent of the recent total new player sign-ups, and 67 percent of its total gross daily revenue across all of PartyGaming products.

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I think there is a message in what is not here. From the beginning I suspected that the non-U.S. sites were going to experience trouble in the crucial Canadian market and Western hemisphere markets in general. It's hard to provide good game selection for these markets without U.S. players because of the timezone difference. Plus cultural ties between the U.S. and Canada are strong which creates many intangible advantages in Canada for the sites that cater to the U.S. The benefits also tend to compound as market gains lead to more gains thanks to word-of-mouth recruiting and a bolstered affiliate network within a country.

Canadians are wealthy and heavily represented in online poker. I suspect that they are second only to the U.S. as a current source of online gaming revenue. This is not a trivial problem for Party and it is even more serious for smaller sites that may offer very few games during North American prime time.