POKER STAR OBRESTAD INVESTS IN POKER MANAGER

25 January 2008

Alpha Innovation community website lists over 10 000 tournaments, 200 000 videos


The 19-year-old online and land tournament poker star Annette Obrestad is making some canny investments in the poker industry and this week increased her shareholding in Norwegian community and information website Poker Manager.com to 5 percent. Other shareholders include European Poker Tour aces Peter Willers Jepsen and Bjorn-Erik Glenne, who helped build the concept, and unidentified Scandinavian investors.

Obrested played a role in developing Poker Manager, which is owned by Alpha Innovation AS and provides the player community with a free to download, community poker resource and tool. It has a complete listing of all off and online poker tournaments which is continuously updated, a massive on-demand 200 000 poker video archive, free tools, blogs from members who include international professionals, a magazine, instant messaging and poker calendars.

The resource also lists satellites available to access the tournaments, and a YouTube-like video-share service where members of the website can create and share their own video and audio blogs. Some of the more confident members are using this facility to produce their own poker school inside the software.

The site retains links with traditional poker feature publications through an exclusive partnership with Bluff Magazine, providing visitors with the poker related news and articles from that publisher.

Obrestad's online poker screen-name "Annette_15" has become well known in recent times following a series of high profile and big-money successes. She claims never to have had to deposit money on any online poker site. Instead she made her initial online bankroll by winning free roll poker tournaments from which she went on to amass several hundred thousand dollars in online winnings. Between September 2006 and February 2007, she won over $700 000 playing online tournaments only, and is ranked among the top 10 players online.

The young Norwegian finished in 7th place in the World Championship of Online Poker and went on to play successfully in the live poker environment of the World Series of Poker and the inaugural World Series of Poker (Europe) Main Event, winning the latter the day before her 19th birthday. By collecting the US$ 2.01 million first prize she positioned herself high on the list of international poker players, and last year entered into an agreement with gambling group Betfair as its poker ambassadress.

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