Former World Poker Tour Company Invests in Oil

Steve Lipscomb (left) and Lyle Berman (right) are now oil men.

When World Poker Tour Enterprises sold off all its assets late last year it was left as a paper company with $28 million in cash and no assets outside of its experience in poker. Plans to shift into a different line of business were announced at the time, though there was no indication what type of plans Steve Lipscomb, Lyle Berman and Bradley Berman had for their company. Considering they changed the name of the company to Ante4 when they searched for a new business model, you could be forgiven for thinking they would stay in the gaming business, maybe even in poker. But you’d be wrong in all but the loosest sense – Lipscomb and the Bermans are now in the oil business.

Just less than a month ago Ante4 merged with an oil leasing company from Billings, Mont., to form a new company called Voyager Oil & Gas. Shares traded at $1.40 each immediately after the merger, which was about what a cash divestiture to WPT shareholders would’ve been worth if the company had just folded. But in just a month they have soared to $3.20, far above the price that the old poker company’s stock traded at in recent years. “We thought if we could find a company with a great business model that needed cash, the stock would trade significantly above $1.40,” Lyle Berman told the Los Angeles Business Journal. “We have fulfilled that mission. I don’t think we have many unhappy shareholders.”

The company’s new haunt is the Bakken Formation and Tiger Ridge areas of Montana, where it will be able to fund drilling at five or six sites with the money it once used to televise poker tournaments. The Bakken region has been known to hold oil for years, but the technology to free that oil from the shale that holds it has only recently become available. With a little luck, and maybe a spike in the price of oil, Lipscomb and the Bermans should be drinking your milkshake in no time at all.