PokerStars has opened its player pool to operators it does not own for the first time in its 25-year history. Flutter's PokerStars Network went to market as a B2B product on 21 September 2026 and is being pitched to outside operators at SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October.
The number underneath the announcement is the one that explains it. In the 30 days to 13 September, PokerStars averaged 2,274 concurrent cash game players against 9,345 at GGPoker, and Flutter's five ranked poker networks combined held under half of GGPoker's total.
The launch copy explains what is on offer. It does not explain how the room that once ran the biggest pool in online poker spent two decades refusing to share it, then started selling access. That history is the story.
- What opened: the PokerStars Network (PSN), now offered to operators outside Flutter on an Access (white label) or Brand Franchise basis.
- When: confirmed Monday 21 September 2026, with PokerStarsNetwork.com live as the B2B front door.
- Where the pitch happens: SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October, at the Flutter stand.
- What partners get: the PokerStars pool where regulation allows it, plus the Sunday Million, Spin & Go, the EPT and the PokerStars Open.
- What has not happened: no operator outside Flutter has been named. Sisal in Italy remains the only published case study.
What PokerStars Announced on 21 September
PokerStars has run other brands on its technology before, but only brands Flutter or its predecessors owned. This confirmation changes that: a licensed operator with no connection to Flutter can now put its players into PokerStars games.
The proposition is set out on the network's own site, PokerStarsNetwork.com, which launched alongside the announcement. It describes millions of active network players, an award-winning platform and, in its words, white label options alongside a partner's existing branding.
Two structures are on the table. Under Access, the partner keeps its own brand and plugs into the pool. Under Brand Franchise, the partner operates the PokerStars brand itself in its market.
- Liquidity: shared to the limit each regulator permits, segregated where it does not.
- Products: the Sunday Million, Spin & Go, the EPT and the PokerStars Open, available to partner players.
- Integrity: PokerStars' game integrity function covers partner traffic.
- Branding: partner-led, PokerStars-led, or a mix, decided market by market.
Michael Boland of Flutter, who is fronting the pitch, described the target list narrowly in a 23 September interview. The network wants tier-one operators in significant regulated markets, and he said the team is not trying to build a large reseller network.
“We're going to be deliberately selective with who we work with.”
Michael Boland, Flutter, 23 September 2026
How PokerStars Kept the Pool to Itself for 25 Years
For a quarter of a century, the answer to any brand asking to sit at PokerStars tables was no, unless PokerStars bought the brand first. The timeline below shows how long that policy held, and how quickly it reversed once Flutter finished moving its own rooms.
| Year | What happened | What it meant for the pool |
|---|---|---|
| 2001 | PokerStars launches, run from Costa Rica by Rational Enterprises, with an Isle of Man office from 2005 | One brand, one pool |
| 2003 | Chris Moneymaker turns an $86 PokerStars satellite into the $2.5M WSOP Main Event win | The boom runs through PokerStars' lobby |
| 2006 | UIGEA passes; PartyPoker withdraws from the US, PokerStars stays | PokerStars takes the US volume PartyPoker leaves behind |
| 2011 | Black Friday, 15 April: DOJ indictments, PokerStars exits the US | Pool loses the US but survives intact |
| 2012 | 31 July: DOJ settlement, Full Tilt assets acquired, brand reopened in November | A second brand under the same roof, still a separate pool |
| 2014 | 1 August: Amaya buys Rational Group for $4.9bn | Ownership changes, single-pool policy does not |
| 2016 | May: Full Tilt migrated onto the PokerStars platform | The one time PokerStars shared its pool, with a brand it owned |
| 2020 | 5 May: Flutter completes the Stars Group acquisition | PokerStars, Betfair, Paddy Power and Sky Poker under one parent, on different networks |
| 2021 | 25 February: Full Tilt brand closed | Back to one brand, one pool |
| 2024 | December: Sisal joins PSN in Italy, keeps its own brand | First non-PokerStars brand in a PokerStars pool |
| 2025 | End of May: Sky Poker leaves for iPoker, not PokerStars | Flutter's UK brands still sit on a rival network |
| 2026 | 1 April: PokerStars US moves to FanDuel; 13 August: PokerStars on Betfair; 21 September: PSN opens to outside operators | The policy reverses |
The 2003 row is where the closed-pool logic came from. Moneymaker's $86 PokerStars satellite in 2003 sent WSOP Main Event fields from 839 entries to 8,773 within three years, and PokerStars became the largest poker site in the world on the back of it.
A room with that kind of flow has no reason to share it. Every year that PokerStars stayed on top, the case for opening the doors got weaker.
Full Tilt: The One Time PokerStars Shared Its Pool
The only time another brand shared PokerStars liquidity, it took a US Department of Justice settlement to create the situation, and PokerStars owned the brand before a single hand was dealt.
The figures below come from PokerStars' own settlement announcement of 31 July 2012, which is also the document that gave it the Full Tilt assets.
- $547 million: paid to the DOJ over three years, part of it used to reimburse Full Tilt's US players.
- $184 million: placed in a segregated account to repay every non-US Full Tilt customer within 90 days.
- $731 million: the combined cost of the settlement and the assets.
- November 2012: Full Tilt reopened as a separate brand with its own pool.
- May 2016: Full Tilt migrated onto PokerStars software, a date Amaya recorded in its 2016 annual filing.
Less than five years after the migration, on 25 February 2021, the brand was closed and its players folded into PokerStars. The one shared-pool experiment ended the way the policy always pointed: one brand, one pool.
Why Now: The GGPoker Gap
The reason the policy reversed is visible in one table. Our September online poker traffic report, built on SharkScope data via Poker Industry PRO and covering the 30 days to 13 September, has GGPoker at more than four times the PokerStars International pool on cash games.
| Network | Cash players (30-day avg) | Daily MTT entries (30-day avg) |
|---|---|---|
| GGPoker | 9,345 | 655,781 |
| PokerStars | 2,274 | 176,096 |
| CoinPoker | 1,935 | 59,908 |
| WPT Global | 1,849 | 72,733 |
| iPoker | 1,237 | 69,585 |
| Flutter, all five ranked networks | 3,810 | 305,839 |
Add every PokerStars-branded pool Flutter runs and the total is 3,810 cash players, still well under half of GGPoker's 9,345. NSUS, GGPoker's parent, holds 2.56 times Flutter's cash traffic across every pool we track.
Our own reporting in February 2025 put PokerStars' peak at around 70% market share and around 8,000 concurrent cash players. The room that had no reason to share a pool of 8,000 now has every reason to share a pool of 2,274.
GGPoker got there partly by doing what PokerStars refused to do. Natural8, BetKings and PokerOK are separate brands sitting in the same GGNetwork pool, and that model built the liquidity PokerStars is now trying to buy back.
Italy Was the Test Run
PokerStars did not arrive in Lisbon without evidence. In December 2024, Sisal replaced its previous poker provider and joined the PokerStars Network in Italy and kept its own brand.
The numbers that follow are PokerStars Network's own, published in its Sisal case study, and they are the only performance figures the network has released.
- Revenue: Sisal's poker revenue is up by more than 50% since integration, on the network's own figures.
- Market share: the combined Italian network holds more than 55% of the market.
- Sunday Million Italian Edition: ran with a guarantee above €2 million, which the case study calls the largest in Italian poker history.
- Live: Sisal players qualified for the first PokerStars Open in Campione, on Lake Lugano.
SNAI, another Flutter brand, followed Sisal into the Italian pool. PokerStars Italy sits at 662 concurrent cash players in the September report, eighth in the world by cash players and the biggest room in any ring-fenced national market we track.
The Flutter Consolidation Behind the Curtain
The sequence matters. Flutter moved every poker brand it owned onto the PokerStars pool before it offered the pool to anyone else, and the last of those moves is still in progress.
Boland described the network as already live in four shapes, each built around what the local regulator allows.
| Pool | Markets | Brands in the pool |
|---|---|---|
| Italy, ring-fenced | Italy | PokerStars, Sisal, SNAI |
| Southern European shared | Spain, France, Portugal | PokerStars |
| North America | Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania | PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel |
| Global .com | Licensed international markets including the UK | PokerStars, Betfair, with Paddy Power and Sky Poker to follow |
The US went first. PokerStars US moved to FanDuel in April, merging Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania into a single pool under the FanDuel brand.
The UK came next, and it is the part that shows how late the change came. Betfair joined the PokerStars pool on 13 August, with Paddy Power and Sky Poker to follow later in 2026 and the standalone PokerStars UK skin closing before the end of 2026.
Sky Poker's route is the clearest measure of how quickly the strategy turned. Independent from 2007, Sky Poker left for iPoker in May 2025 rather than PokerStars, and less than two years later it is being moved again, this time into the PokerStars pool.
One exchange worth reporting as it happened: the interviewer put it to Boland that FanDuel's US poker product runs on iPoker software, an odd fit for a network pitched as the alternative to iPoker. Boland called the technology underneath a separate question and said FanDuel is part of PSN through shared liquidity, brand and live events.
What the PokerStars Network Means for the Player
None of this changes anything at the table on the day a partner signs. What changes is who is sitting there, and three things follow from that.
- Liquidity: partner players sit at the same cash tables and enter the same tournaments as PokerStars players, in whichever pool their licence allows.
- Game quality: sportsbook-first brands have historically brought recreational players into shared pools. That is the iPoker pattern, and it is the reason the partner model matters more than the software.
- Fields and guarantees: a partner's players count towards Sunday Million and series fields, which is how a shared pool lets a network post guarantees no single brand would carry alone.
The open question: on iPoker, individual skins run their own promotions and rakeback. PokerStars has said nothing about whether PSN partners can do the same. Until it does, a partner room is a route into the PokerStars pool, not a different deal on it.
What to Watch Next
The announcement is a sales pitch, and sales pitches are judged by who signs. These are the markers that will show whether the network is working.
- The first independent partner: none has been named. Boland's own framing rules out a rush of small operators, so the first name will say a lot about the ambition.
- Lisbon: SBC Summit runs 29 September to 1 October, and any partnership announced there will have been signed on the back of this pitch.
- Paddy Power and Sky Poker: both are due on the network before the end of 2026, and no date has been published for either.
- The PokerStars UK skin: due to close before the end of 2026, with UK players moving to the Betfair front door.
- The October traffic report: the first full month with Betfair inside the PokerStars pool, and the first hard number on whether consolidation moves the cash figure.
Whether the PokerStars Network works will show up in one number, and it is the number PokerStars spent 25 years not needing to worry about. The October traffic report lands around 15 October, and our latest poker news will carry the first partner name if Lisbon produces one.
