It’s summertime - or at least that’s what the calendar tells us - and the living should be easy. But as this week’s Gambling Compliance podcast suggests, such is not the case across the European poker market as the now traditional seasonal slowdown might be masking a more serious downturn in the fortunes of the online operators.

As far as poker is concerned, going out is the new staying in. Not even the additional competition for online gambling spend from June’s Euro 2008 football tournament and the Beijing Olympics can fully explain the noticeable decline in European poker numbers in recent months, where revenues have seemingly been sinking faster than Australia’s Olympic medal hopes.

Upcoming interim results from industry heavyweights 888 and PartyGaming this week are likely to further underline a theme from the financial results seen to date in this reporting season.

Ladbrokes, William Hill, Bwin and Betsson are just four online gaming operators to have reported quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year declines in poker revenues in recent weeks, while platform provider CryptoLogic has also confirmed it saw revenues from its poker business drop 27 percent on the second quarter of 2007.

So does this mean that the European poker boom is over? Well, not if you are PokerStars which recently flooded the UK and Europe with an expensive multi-million pound marketing campaign which caused much gnashing of teeth among ex-US facing European operators.

But still it is becoming ever more evident that the low-hanging fruit in the European market has been picked off, digested and discarded - leaving the major European-facing operators desperately searching for alternative routes to maximising their poker gains.

The signs are that a shake-up is taking place, if not quite yet a shake-out. The search for greater liquidity is seen as the most pressing problem. Collaboration is now the word on every operators lips: Ladbrokes last month said it would be merging its high-staking tables with others on the Microgaming network from 2009 in order to counter the “highly competitive [poker] environment” and offer larger prize pots for customers, while William Hill CEO Ralph Topping suggested his company could do likewise, possibly ending its longstanding relationship with CryptoLogic in the process.

Crypto, in turn, is equally aware of the great liquidity crisis.

CEO Brian Hadfield said earlier this month that addressing the issue was top of the company’s agenda, and hinted of ongoing talks over possible moves to integrate its licensees’ poker rooms with those on other networks, or as Hadfield put it, moves that would “turn competitors into collaborators”.

Hadfield said he thought the soon-to-be-unveiled plans for cross-network collaboration would allow his own company to prevent William Hill’s defection, and that the industry in general would see “changes in the marketplace that will change the landscape of poker completely.”

Other observers, however, doubt whether the industry is ready for such forms of collaboration, even if there’s little doubt that fundamental change is on the horizon.

The chief executive of CryptoLogic rival Playtech said he thought cross-network collaboration would be hard to implement from a technical perspective, and would in any case take a long time to realize – too long, maybe, for some networks to outlive the market’s current decline.

“In the future there will be less networks,” Playtech’s Mor Weizer opined. “The smaller ones will struggle to survive. There will be a consolidation process. The landscape will change.”

International expansion, particularly in Asia, is another favoured option amongst European-facing poker providers.

For example, CryptoLogic said it “expects modest but fast growing revenues” from investment in Asia, while Playtech has signed up Asian gaming giant Genting as a licensee already this year.

But the sharp drop-off in revenues experienced in Europe in 2008 could come to inform analyst and investor projections of long-term growth expectations in these new and unproven markets. Plus, as GamblingCompliance explored in last week’s podcast, the US market is showing no signs of opening up to internet poker, even on a state-by-state level.

So is the poker boom over? Not exactly, according to Playtech’s Weizer, but as he says, “the poker boom is no longer what it was.”