When shares in Party Gaming, , the world's biggest internet poker group, start trading on the London Stock Exchange at the end of this month, British fund managers will either cheer loudly or be weeping into their bubbly.

The well-publicised risks associated with the group - doubts about the legality of internet gambling in America being just one - resulted in today's indicated price range for the shares coming in lower than had originally been hoped.

The group, which operates PartyPoker website and owns other brands including Starluck Casino and PartyBingo, generates 80 per cent of its business in America and its headquarters will remain there after the London float.

Against an originally hoped-for valuation of about £5.5 billion, a pricing at the midpoint of the 111p to 227p range put out today would give the group a market value of more like £4.6 billion.

Alongside the interest taken in online gambling by the US Justice Department, some investors have also raised eyebrows at the millions the founding shareholders will make when they cash in about 20 per cent of their stake.

Although the directors have to sell some of their shares in order to generate a free float for the listing, it is not entirely clear that Party Gaming needs a listing.

A mid-range pricing in these conditions would value Party Gaming at just over 14 times its $601.6 million of revenues for the year to the end of December 2004, a discount to its closest - albeit much smaller - peer, Sportingbet, which floated in January 2001.

So some fund managers are not sure they're ready to take the gamble.

But let's be clear, it is only fund managers that will be able to decide whether to buy Party Gaming shares, or walk away from the roulette table before the wheel starts spinning.

From the beginning, it was decided that retail investors should not be able to subscribe for the shares in this particular issue.

Surely, this can't be right? Party Gaming will immediately be catapulted into the FTSE 100 index of leading stocks. As well as having the air of a household name always popular with the investing public, the float will be the biggest of the year so far in London in market value terms, aside from the "technical" introduction of O2, the former BT-owned mobile business, in March.

It will also be biggest new issue in market value terms since February 2001, when mobile phone group Orange floated in London and Paris for £29 million.

Both Orange, O2 and BT are popular among retail investors, who have since the blowout privatisations of the 1990s been encouraged to become part of a British share-owning democracy.

True, many individual investors were seriously burned during the red-hot IPO tech boom that ended so dramatically in 2000. True, retail investors still account for a fraction of the stock market and Party Gaming's underwriters, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, are under no obligation to let them in on the listing.

City sources argue that Party Gaming and its bankers are content that they will find sufficient demand for Party Gaming from the institutional fund management community. If the retail public want to buy the shares, let them buy up in the after-market, they say. If you are particularly wealthy, you may also be able to use your private client account to help gain access to the subscription book.

It is also true that neither Sportingbet, nor William Hill, the bookmaker, sold shares to the public when they floated.

But if Party Gaming does get away successfully, fund managers will be sitting on healthy first-day profits. There is no credible reason why the individual investing public should not be allowed to take their chances with the rest of them.

Incidentally, when Times Online pointed out the absence of the public in Party Gaming's float to David Buik, a leading market commentator at spread betting firm Cantor Index, he delivered a typically forthright response.

He said: "This strikes me as a very, very odd decision made by DKW and associates. Even if the roadshows throughout Europe, go well why exclude what might be a very receptive sector, particularly when there will be no support from US fund and hedge fund managers. This decision strikes me as very short sighted."

If capitalism is about risk-taking - within a framework of supervision and regulation - then everyone should be able to share in the wins as well as the losses.

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