Zynga, the social-gaming giant, announced Tuesday that it has acquired the team from MarketZero, a poker services provider. MarketZero powers the popular poker stats site PokerTableRatings with its massive bank of servers that monitor poker rooms, crunching the data that online poker players crave. Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, CityVille and other popular social games, says it only hired the MarketZero staff, though, and it won’t operate or acquire MarketZero’s business (e.g. PokerTableRatings).
“This acquisition leverages the knowledge and expertise of the team,” Zynga said. MarketZero masterminded “the largest online portal tracking career statistics of online poker players,” Zynga says.
MarketZero’s founders include Gustavo Abdala, Amir Elaguizy, Nir Leibovich, Timothy Sullivan and Jason Wang. The entire team will work for Zynga Poker to help develop new and innovative features within their games.It should be interesting to see if the new team will add some of the interactive features that were developed through MarketZero’s platform. For example, PokerTableRatings’ tools help poker players maximize their online profits through a real time Table Selector, Player Research Tool, a Buddy List with Email Alerts, and other reports.
PokerTableRatings news piece indicated that members shouldn’t see any difference on the site. “PTR hasn’t skipped a beat and we’re working hard to make sure PTR continues to be the best place to find stats on every online poker player,” PTR says.
In the past year, Zynga has seen tremendous success and growth. It acquired 11 companies from around the world in as many months. And Monday, Zynga announced DreamWorks co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was joining the social-gaming company’s board of directors.
Zynga is also rumored to be considering an IPO in 2012.
