Lately, I have been beginning my posts about gambling companies and the current state of their industry with a somewhat long winded introduction about the major impact that the downward economy is having.  However, at this point, you are all aware that gambling companies are going through an extremely difficult period of time (along with companies in just about every other industry), so I'll skip the long introduction and jump right into the latest news.

PartyGaming has announced their third quarter financials, and in what should come as no surprise to anyone who is reading this post, their revenues were down.  Although their revenues are down, PartyGaming seems to be fairing at least somewhat better than many of the other large gambling companies.  Their revenues were down for the third quarter of 2008, but not dramatically in comparison to their revenues for the third quarter of 2007.  They announced that their third quarter revenues for this year were close to sixty-five million dollars, and when compared to the same quarter in 2007, this is approximately a fifteen percent decline.

Although you have most likely heard of PartyGaming before (I would go as far as to guess that many of you are even members of the PartyGaming website), I want to put something in context for you.  Prior to the end of 2006, PartyGaming controlled the undisputed largest poker website on the Internet.  Unfortunately, this was the time when the US Government made their move into this industry, and PartyGaming had no choice but to end their service for members who were located in the United States.  As a result of this change in their company policy, PartyGaming went from being a company that was valued in the seven billion dollar range to currently only being valued in the range of four to five hundred million dollars.  While that's still an impressive number, it's obviously hard to stomach when you look at where they were just about two years ago.