PokerStars Puts UK Players on Betfair in Network Liquidity Push

PokerStars is moving its UK poker product onto the Betfair platform from August 13, 2026, the first step in a plan by parent group Flutter Entertainment to pool its UK poker players across three of the country’s biggest betting brands.

The integration launches under a co-branded “PokerStars on Betfair” offer, with Paddy Power and Sky Poker set to host the PokerStars product later in 2026, according to an announcement on the PokerStars blog. The existing PokerStars UK platform will continue to operate in the interim, but Flutter intends for the brand and its customers to eventually migrate fully onto the Betfair Casino platform.

The move is the UK leg of a wider shift to what the company calls a liquidity-focused operating model, built around the PokerStars Network (PSN) — a single multinational player pool shared across Flutter’s brands rather than separate, ring-fenced pools for each one.

“PokerStars is the most iconic brand in global poker – these changes ensure that it remains a core, strategic brand within Flutter’s portfolio,” said Mike Woodbridge, Chief Commercial Officer at PokerStars. “In recent years the market environment has got harder for brands like PokerStars. A patchwork of regulation from one market to the next has fragmented the global game and led us to make difficult decisions to exit certain markets and not enter others.”

“Players have felt it through thinner fields and smaller tournament prizes on our site,” Woodbridge continued. “We want to do something about that, so we’re moving to a different model with the aim of improving liquidity and player pools and bringing people back to the poker table.”

Kim Daly, Managing Director for Betfair, said: “I’m thrilled to bring two iconic brands under one roof. By integrating PokerStars onto the Betfair platform, we’re uniting two category-transformers that share a passion for innovation and player empowerment.”

What changes for UK players

For now, the practical answer is very little. The PokerStars FAQ accompanying the announcement tells players that no action is required, that player funds “remain safe and segregated,” and that anyone whose access route will change will be contacted directly with step-by-step guidance ahead of time.

One restriction takes effect with the launch: existing PokerStars UK players will not be able to open new Betfair accounts. Where local rules allow players to hold accounts with more than one Flutter brand, a player can only be logged in and playing on one account at a time, and the company says its fair-play and security standards apply across the network.

The flagship tournament schedule is unaffected. PokerStars says it intends to keep running the Sunday Million and Sunday Storm, along with major series such as WCOOP and SCOOP, for “many more years”, and is pitching the pooled network as a route to bigger fields and deeper prize pools for exactly those events.

How the PokerStars Network model works

Flutter’s answer is to consolidate the pools it already controls. Rather than running poker as a standalone vertical on each brand, the PSN connects players across its portfolio into shared games — so a Betfair customer and a Paddy Power customer sit at the same tables. The group has already run the play twice: in Italy, where PokerStars was integrated into its Sisal and SNAI brands, and in North America, where PokerStars became a FanDuel-exclusive product in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ontario in March 2026, delivering shared liquidity across those three US states.

The UK is the biggest test of the model yet. Betfair, Sky Betting & Gaming and Paddy Power are three of the country’s largest online gambling brands, and folding their poker players into one pool with the wider PokerStars .com network would create one of the largest regulated liquidity pools in the market.

The road to consolidation

For most of the time since, PokerStars has operated as a standalone global poker platform, but the group has spent 2026 repositioning it as a network layer inside its local hero brands. The FanDuel migration in North America came first in March 2026; the Betfair integration announced on August 10, 2026 extends the same logic to the UK, with Sky and Paddy Power to follow.

The commercial backdrop is a tougher UK cost environment. The rate of Remote Gaming Duty (the tax on online casino and poker profits) rose from 21% to 40% on April 1, 2026, applying to accounting periods beginning on or after that date. Flutter has also just come through a difficult quarter, reporting a $296m net loss for Q2 2026. Consolidating three poker pools into one is also a cost and efficiency play: one platform to maintain rather than parallel products on each brand.

The rollout lands in the middle of a leadership handover at the group. Dan Taylor, currently CEO of Flutter’s international division, is due to succeed long-serving group chief executive Peter Jackson in October 2026, with investors told to expect continuity of strategy under the new leadership.

What happens next

The first dated milestone is August 13, 2026, when Betfair account holders gain access to “PokerStars on Betfair.” Paddy Power and Sky Poker integrations are scheduled for later in 2026, with no specific date yet given. PokerStars says it will contact affected UK players directly before any change to how they access the product, and the full migration of the existing PokerStars UK player base onto Betfair Casino is the longer-term endpoint. No completion date has been set for that step.