SOURCE: The Times Online

Knowing when to hold and when to fold has been the key skill for PartyGaming shareholders, who have seen their investment buffeted over the past year by arrests, prohibition laws, stock sales and apparently spurious takeover theories.

For a few hours yesterday, the attention returned to trading. Shares gained as much as 3¼p to 43p on optimism that the poker site operator’s annual results due Thursday will impress.

PartyGaming is said to have benefited from payment processors such as Neteller closing the door on U.S. players who were using rival sites, thereby making its tables look more popular by comparison. Dresdner Klienwort, the group’s house broker, estimated the number of poker players using real money had risen by 30 per cent since the end of November.

But this optimism did not extend to one shareholder, who used the strength to dump about £50 million of stock via Morgan Stanley. Shares erased gains in reaction, closing unchanged at 39¾p as 300 million were traded — about five times the daily average.

While the seller’s identity was a mystery, some dealers reckoned the bundle of 123 million issues could have come from Orbis. The Bermuda-based fund is believed to have bought stock owned by founder Vikrant Bhargava in January. Nevertheless, the founders’ history of choosing their moments to sell meant nobody was prepared to rule them out.