Global Poker Index Acquires Hendon Mob Site, Database
Highlighting post-WSOP poker-related news was word this morning that the Global Poker Index tournament player ranking site has completed a deal to acquire the popular and much-consulted Hendon Mob website and database of tournament results.
In an announcement regarding the acquisition appearing on the Global Poker Index site today, CEO Alexandre Dreyfus of Zokay Entertainment (the GPI’s parent company) spoke of the intention both to bolster the Hendon Mob site’s current efforts to document and report worldwide poker tournament results as well as to expand the site’s coverage and reporting capabilities.
“We plan to support and grow this tremendous asset,” said Dreyfus, noting how “as a combined company” the GPI and Hendon Mob will “truly form an authoritative hub for all poker players, particularly those who compete in live events.”
Barny Boatman — one of the original four members of the Hendon Mob who won his first WSOP bracelet this summer in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event — is also quoted in the announcement stating how “the legacy of the Hendon Mob is safe and its future secure” thanks to the deal with GPI. Another Hendon Mob founder, Joe Beevers, additionally chimes in to express his happiness with the new partnership.
The Hendon Mob began as an outgrowth of a home game in the 1990s played in the London suburb of Hendon that involved Boatman, his brother Ross, Beevers, and Ram Vaswani. As tournament poker began to become more popular, the friends started traveling to events together and thereby earned the group nickname, then earned greater exposure with the 1999 debut of “Late Night Poker” in the U.K.
The Hendon Mob website was then launched in 2001 originally as a site to chronicle the group’s adventures, although the scope of the site soon expanded with the growth of a popular forum and eventually the creation and development of the database. Before long the site formed a long-standing partnership with Full Tilt Poker with the founders becoming sponsored “red pros,” although that arrangement dissolved in the fall of 2011 in the wake of the Black Friday indictment and civil complaint targeting FTP.
The Hendon Mob next formed a partnership with the Genting Poker Tour which lasted nearly two years until ending last month. That arrangement had also involved a promotional deal between the iPoker skin Genting Poker and Hendon Mob that saw Genting’s players earning money for live and online tourney entries by playing hands and accumulating rake on Genting.
Soon after the June announcement that the Genting Poker Tour and Hendon Mob were severing ties came a post on the Hendon Mob forum by Genting Poker Manager James Lowe reporting the sudden end of the promotion which for a short period left many players believing the points they’d accumulated had become worthless. But Genting followed up with a clarification that they’d be honoring points earned in promotion, as Nick Jones reported for PokerFuse.
The Hendon Mob rightly occupies an important place in recent poker history both as an important virtual hub for the U.K. poker community serving as an important catalyst for the game’s growth during the “boom” years of the previous decade and for its comprehensive, constantly updated database of tournament results presently relied upon by essentially every poker media outlet that reports on poker tournaments.
Meanwhile, the Global Poker Index represents the last remaining vestige of the failed Epic Poker League whose parent company, Federated Sports & Gaming, filed for bankruptcy in February 2012. Created as part of the EPL’s system for determining player eligibility for its tournaments, the GPI and other assets were first acquired by Pinnacle Entertainment in June 2012, then a couple of months later was sold to Zokay Entertainment who has since continued to develop both the GPI brand and promote the ranking system.
The acquisition follows the GPI’s partnering with the World Series of Poker over the summer that involved the GPI-based Facebook game Fantasy Poker Manager serving as the “official fantasy poker game” of the WSOP.
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