Online poker company to create 100 new jobs

A DUBLIN-based subsidiary of the world’s second largest online poker room, Full Tilt Poker, has confirmed the creation of a further 100 jobs. The recruitment drive will bring to 800 the numbers employed at Pocket King Ltd’s operations at the Cherrywood Science and Technology Park.

Pocket Kings acts as a service provider to Full Tilt Poker and established in Dublin in 2006.

One of Pocket Kings’s two directors is Ray Bitar, who is one of the founders of the US-based Full Tilt Poker that controls Pocket Kings.

A company spokeswoman said yesterday the numbers employed at the company had almost doubled from the 390 employed at the end of April 2009.

“From our last accounts filing [for the period up to April 2009], we have sustained our accelerated growth and almost doubled our headcount,” said the spokeswoman.

The accounts for the 12 months to the end of April 2009, which were only recently filed to the Companies Office, show the company’s pretax profits declined by 26 per cent from €8 million to €5.9 million. Its gross profit fell 5 per cent from €47.1 million to €44.7 million.

The company said it would continue to recruit even after the current posts were filled, the spokeswoman said.

“This growth trend is estimated to continue at this strong rate for all of 2011 and beyond. All of our positions are for highly skilled technical and marketing positions with a significant number requiring a second European language.”

Some of the latest jobs are quite specialised, including fraud analysts for the Italian, German and French markets along with Norwegian, Japanese, Greek, Russian, Hebrew and Korean customer service agents.

“Ireland has always been an attractive location for us and continues to be so,” said the company spokeswoman. “The accessibility to a skilled and educated workforce in Ireland along with an attractive corporation tax rate continues to be deciding factors in our decision to remain here.”