Morning Brief: Viva Italia

With your morning coffee or afternoon tea:

Playtech Ltd. has done a deal with Snai SpA, the land-based Italian gambling operator, for the provision of a tournament-style poker network. (The full story will follow this afternoon, as IGamingNews is attempting to arrange a call with Playtech management.)

Our preliminary read is that, for Playtech, this is a solid move into a new -- and most importantly, regulated -- jurisdiction. While Snai is offering a free-play downloadable version of Playtech's software at the moment, real-money, tournament-style games will be on offer from the fourth quarter of this year. Though tournament-style play is not known for its giant revenue-generative potential, Italy may yet open its market to cash games. If so, Playtech would be strongly positioned as a beneficiary.

Roth Capital Partners, the California brokerage, has a research note out this morning on the impact of the Olympics on China-facing online gaming operators:

"We believe concurrent player levels dropped by 50% or more on August 8th, the day of the opening ceremony, and while user levels have rebounded for many games since then, they still trail pre-Olympic user levels," it said. "In our opinion, user levels will likely improve as the Games come to an end. However, we expect the month of September to be unusually competitive as operators vie to outspend each other in hopes of making up for a disappointing August."

Roth predicts that GigaMedia Ltd., the Taiwan software developer whose second-quarter results were reported yesterday, will be one of few Olympic beneficiaries. The full story will follow this afternoon.