UK Poker Under PokerStars Brand
PokerStars is consolidating poker across Flutter Entertainment's UK brands into a single network. Betfair is first: PokerStars replaces its poker product with "PokerStars on Betfair" from 13 August 2026, ahead of Paddy Power and Sky Poker joining later in the year.
PokerStars is bringing its poker software to Betfair in the UK, and from 13 August 2026 it will replace Betfair's existing poker product entirely under the co-branded name "PokerStars on Betfair." The change moves Betfair's UK poker players onto the PokerStars Network, giving them access to the wider PokerStars.com global player pool through their existing Betfair account. Migrated players keep access to PokerStars-branded tournaments, including the Sunday Million, SCOOP, WCOOP, and European Poker Tour qualification routes.
Paddy Power Poker and Sky Poker, the two other UK poker brands Flutter Entertainment owns, will follow the same path later in 2026, replacing their own poker products with the PokerStars Network model. Flutter Entertainment has not yet confirmed a date for either brand.
Why Flutter Is Consolidating Its Poker Brands
PokerStars Chief Commercial Officer Mike Woodbridge said regulatory fragmentation across markets has thinned player fields and reduced tournament prize pools brand by brand, and that PokerStars wants to address this by moving to a model built around improving liquidity. Betfair Managing Director Kim Daly welcomed the change, describing it as bringing two well-known brands together under one roof.
Pooling player liquidity under a single network rather than running separate poker products per brand is not new within Flutter's wider business. The same model already operates through Sisal and SNAI in Italy, and through FanDuel in North America. In each case, the individual brand keeps its own front end and branding for players, while the underlying poker software, tournament schedule, and player pool run on one shared network behind it. Flutter's stated reasoning for bringing this model to its three UK poker brands mirrors the logic behind the Italian and North American rollouts: bigger, shared tournament fields and prize pools than any single brand could sustain by running its own separate poker product. A wider shared pool also gives a poker room more room to spread tournament formats and stake levels across the day than a single brand's own player base could support.
What This Means For UK Players
The migration affects UK-registered players only. Non-UK PokerStars players continue operating on their existing platform and remain unaffected by this change. For Betfair's existing poker customers, the switch to PokerStars on Betfair takes effect automatically from 13 August 2026, and players will not need to open a separate account. Flutter Entertainment has not published specific figures on how much player traffic or prize pool sizes it expects the consolidation to add. The announcement follows Flutter Entertainment's confirmation earlier this month that Group Chief Executive Officer Peter Jackson will step down at the end of September, though the company has not linked the two announcements in any way. Gambling Zone will report further detail once Paddy Power and Sky Poker's migration dates are confirmed.
