Commenting on Internet gambling business, PartyGaming, which runs the poker website, PartyPoker.com, one newspaper journalist wrote that it is “based around a revolutionary business model which makes nothing, sells nothing, and profits purely from avarice.”

PartyGaming, which makes its money by charging its customers a commission to play against another player or in tournaments, announced its flotation on the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) in London, and is expected to go straight into the FTSE index where other traditional and prestigious British institutions such as Barclays and Marks and Spencer also appear.

Many of PartyGaming’s employees will directly benefit from the flotation too. The company, which employs about one thousand workers at a call center in India, will be providing those employees a windfall of about 300,000 pounds in share options. The good news for the workers was announced at the same time that PartyGaming announced the five billion pound London Stock Exchange flotation. The staff members, which number 1,100, are located mostly in Hyderabad, India, where the PartyGaming call center is located, but some staff members are also located at the head office in Gibraltar, Spain where the company headquarters are based.

Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava, two young graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT), and an American husband-and-wife team own PartyGaming. Bhargava, who owns almost 15 percent of the company, pointed out that when he and Dikshit finished their university studies at ITT, one of the best universities in India, many of their fellow graduates headed off to the United States, hoping to make it rich in the dot com business. “So many people wanted to do something big, but I don’t think we ever thought it would be this big. But the motivation was not money. We have done well at something we enjoy doing.”

To say the company has done well is an extreme understatement and a look at company earnings demonstrates its phenomenal growth. In 2002, PartyGaming’s poker website earned five million pounds, but by 2003, that amount had grown to 68 and by 2003 it had grown to 304 million pounds. Now, in 2005, company earnings have hit 115 million pounds in just the first quarter alone.

Industry analysts say that PartyGaming’s incredible success is largely due to the shrewd business sense of its owners. Taking advantage of poker’s increasing popularity and a huge advertising blitz launched at London’s underground train stations, PartyGaming experienced a meteoric rise in business. Although it attracts players from all over the world, most of the visitors to its site are U.S. citizens, where the poker website, PartyPoker, is extremely popular. The PartyPoker website averages about 70,000 users playing online against each other at one time. In Britain, estimates have the number of online gamblers at 4.3 million and they predict that that number will continue to climb. About four million pounds a day are bet on Internet poker.