Victor Chandler Group, one of Europe's most established names in gaming and betting, last week quietly launched an online poker room with hopes of garnering a share of the growing interactive poker market.
A spokesman for the company told IGN that the site, VCPoker.com, is in a "soft-launch" phase and that a full roll-out will come after developers finish tweaking the system and getting more input from players (probably, he said, in a month or so).
Victor Chandler has always maintained a good market share among the high rollers in the sports betting and gambling industry. That customer base, the spokesman said, will be targeted with the poker site.
Victor Chandler developed the software in house, utilizing partnerships with poker and I-gambling experts. Software developers have been busy tweaking the system during the site's first week of live action
"We have made three major updates to it," the spokesman said. "The majority of the things we have done were geared toward making it more user-friendly, based on information that we obtained from the customers that were using the system. There were really only three minor bugs--and they were very small--that we had to address. Everything else was updated based on input from the players."
Emphasizing the external-testing phase of the site, the spokesman said players can only play poker from 6 p.m. to midnight GMT.
Victor Chandler is the second major land-based brand from England to roll out an Internet poker room. Ladbrokes launched one (through a partnership with software supplier Microgaming) earlier this year. The two land-based brands join a host of Internet-only operations like Poker.com, PartyPoker.com and Pokermadness.com just to name a few.
Victor Chandler's spokesman said the company isn't worried about having to nudge its way into a tightening market. He said the unique vision for the site, coupled with Victor Chandler's established brand, has company officials confident their high expectations can be met.