Poker Stars has just appointed Alex Payne, former marketing and sales director of Microsoft's Bing search engine, as its new Chief Marketing Officer.

Poker Stars has been through a lot lately, what with the April 15 Black Friday seizure of their U.S. assets and an immediate call to repay their ejected U.S. players tens of millions of dollars from their seized accounts (which they notably did pay out) not to mention penalties and fees and an exorbitant lost player pool. But as another signal that the world's formerly largest poker site is on the rapid road to recovery, Poker Stars has just hired Alex Payne, the former marketing and sales director from Bing, Microsoft's blazing new search engine, as their Chief Marketing Officer, the culmination of an 11-year employment history with that firm.

Payne's job will be to help retain PokerStars' 48 million remaining registered members and grow that player base with new members from there, including CRM, social media, search, a sponsored television poker shows, brand development and advertising.

Payne's hiring was the result of an eight-month long international executive search. All regional and central marketing will be under his Isle of Man based helm. The experience Payne's brings to this job from his time at Microsoft includes helping with the European launch of Windows 7 and helping Microsoft develop in cooperation with Yahoo and AOL a standard for Internet advertising for the U.S.. Prior to Microsoft, Payne worked for 10 years for various advertising agencies. He says that he is, of course, "delighted" to be at Poker Stars.