Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Nude Shana Hiatt in a Box

I have sitting on my desk at work right now, in an Amazon box, a copy of Harrington on Hold 'em Vol. 2 and the infamous Playboy: The Girls of Hawaiian Tropic, Naked In Paradise DVD, featuring a barely legal Shana Hiatt. However you spell her name (Shanna, Shawna, Hyatt, etc.), she is one fine looking lady. Reviews to come later. When I'm not at work.



Haven't seen a press release about this, but Empire Online (owners of Empire Poker and recent floaters of an IPO) has apparently acquired Noble Poker. I received the news in an update to affiliates, so I'm not sure how it'll affect Noble, but I'd imagine they'll eventually roll it into their own operations. With Party and Empire going public I wouldn't all be surprised to see more deals like this, with bigger sites acquiring tons of smaller sites not so much for their existing operations or player base but to simply reduce the total slices of poker pie out there.

3 comments:

DuggleBogey said...

I hear Empire is wanting to jump off Party and this is how they are going to do it.

ScurvyDog said...

That's pretty dang interesting, dugglebogey. I can see the motivation, as far as getting out from underneath Party's thumb and licensing fees, but that's easier said then done. Especially on the iPoker software platform Noble uses, which not many people enjoy playing on.

I guess they've got a big player base to lure somewhere, but it seems like they'd lose too many players who simply moved to another skin on the Party network. Interesting, though...

DuggleBogey said...

I agree totally. I'm sure they figure they will lose a ton of customers who are addicted to the Party Aquarium atmosphere, but if they make 3x per customer, they only need to hold on to 1/3rd of their customers in order to break even.

I also heard the impetus for this was Party's refusal to allow them to offer rake rebates. Empire has always been a big rake rebate proponent, so they may be going their own way to be able to offer it again.

BTW, prepare to get a TON of Shana Hiatt search hits on google. Although you will get fewer because most searchers think her name is spelled, Shanna, Shawna or Hyatt.