Phil Ivey, one of the most successful poker pros of all time has launched a new website to tap into the growing success of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS).
The new venture PhilIveyDFS is being hosted on the iTEAM network and is expected to go live within the next couple of weeks.
The DFS industry has been generating enormous interest in the U.S. It has grown exponentially over the past couple of years, recording $2.6 billion in entry fees in 2015 alone.
The DFS industry has had good success in attracting a large number of poker players who have been curious to try out something different from online poker. Poker pro Aaron “aejones” Jones recently took home $5 million, the biggest prize in DFS history after he won the $15M DraftKings Fantasy Football World Championships in Las Vegas.
The fact that the DFS industry is beginning to attract more poker players made it an easy decision for Phil Ivey to launch his new venture. The poker veteran stated that he had been examining options available to him by which he could share his take on DFS with his fans and had a number of companies interested in partnering with him for the launch. However he chose the iTEAM Network for its focus on compliance and its technological prowess, in addition to the leadership of its CEO Gabe Hunterton.
Established in 2013, the iTEAM Network is a business to business DFS technology provider that enables its clients to launch fully branded and operational DFS sites.
In a statement, Gabe Hunterton CEO of iTeam Network said
Adding the Phil Ivey brand will substantially increase network-wide player liquidity and prize pools. We have already started an aggressive marketing and execution plan in which PhilIveyDFS users will be able to compete immediately for more than $20,000 in weekly pro basketball contests and interact directly with Ivey.
This is not Ivey’s first venture outside of poker. He previously launched Ivey Poker, a free-to-play Facebook app and community, but it was closed down in 2014. He currently has a poker training venture called IveyLeague where poker is taught by poker pros including Ivey via instructional videos.
It remains to be seen how this venture of Ivey’s will turn out. The DFS industry is currently going through a turbulent time with ongoing legal investigations and challenges in a number of states in the U.S. Top DFS sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings are locked in a legal battle with Nevada, New York and Illinois over the fact that DFS games should be categorized as gambling under current gaming laws and therefore illegal.
