Tag: online poker

US Players Now Have Bovada Instead of Bodog

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bovada pokerThe talks about Bodog leaving the US market come January were flying all over the internet, but the real story isn’t so much that Bodog will be leaving the US market; but that the NAME Bodog will be leaving the US market.  Bovada is the new option for United States based gamblers, and what’s interesting about the new site, is that it’s actually almost the EXACT same as Bodog, just with a new name.  This new site is up and running for US players, and even if an online gambler from the United States attempts to go to Bodog, they will be re-routed to Bovada, and have a message explaining why this happened.

The site is under Bovada.lv, and the .lv stands for Latvia.  No one is exactly sure as to why they didn’t choose to go with the popular .co or .ag that US players have found themselves used to seeing after Black Friday occurred.  Possibly the best part about Bovada is something that we’ve already mentioned, that they will still have the exact same promotions and games available for their players.  What this means is that players can still do all of their sports betting, play online poker, and play at the casino tables the same way that they did on Bodog.  The feel of the site is the exact same, but overall players will feel incredible comfortable and confident playing at this new site.

So for any United States based players who are looking to continue their action or simply looking for a new online gambling site that offers it all, head over to Bovada (or just go to Bodog and they’ll re-direct you automatically) to get in on the action.  Overall, Bovada is simply a new name, but is the same excellent gambling options for players out there.

The real question that many people are asking is why Bodog decided to make this move.  The easiest answer to that is the answer that many other online gambling sites used for making changes, and it’s simply because they want to avoid run-in’s with the US government, or find themselves involved in any issues such as Black Friday.

Carbon Poker Introduces $5K Value Added Tourneys for December

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Throughout this month of December 2011, Carbon Poker is holding a series of Value Added Tournaments, meaning that to whatever the prize pool amounts to based on registered player buy-ins, Carbon Poker will contribute an additional amount. In this case, that amount is $1,000. And with five of these such tournaments scheduled for December 2011, that makes for $5,000 in Value Added Tournaments.

In an interesting twist on the conventional tourney buy-in, to enter these tournaments you must pay a cash buy-in and earn a minimum of 250 VIP points. The cash part of the buy-ins decreases as the series progresses, with the December 10th tournament costing $10 + $1, the December 17th event costing $5 + $0.50, the December 24th, Christmas Eve, event costing $2 + $0.20, the December 25th, Christmas Day, event costing $1 + $0.10 and the December 31st, New Years Eve event costing $1 + $0.10 as well.

To earn VIP points, simply participate in real money cash ring games and tournaments at Carbon Poker. Every time a hand makes it to the flop, the players still in the hand at that time receive VIP points.

You must earn 250 additional VIP points for each successive Value Added Tournament you wish to enter beyond the first one. However, the VIP points you earn for the entry requirements for these Value Added Tournaments will not be deducted from your account once you enter the event. That means you may still utilize these VIP points for such benefits as guaranteed tournament entries, live seat satellite entries, to unlock bonuses and exchange for cash.

888 Poker Holds LG-2012-Giveaway

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According to their own slogan: “Life’s Good at 888 Poker” but now, just in time for the holidays, 888 Poker is making life even better if you’re a new player to the site, with its LG-2012-Giveaway promotion. In this promotion, 888 Poker is giving new players an added incentive to join the site now with $5,000 worth of LG home electronics, including 3D cinema televisions, smartphones and tablets, up for grabs. They’ll also be giving away some cool cash for the winter holidays. What’s more, this LG-2012-Giveaway will be taking place each and every week.

For a limited time, new players at 888 Poker will now receive, in addition to a $400 welcome bonus, a free entry into the LG-2012-Giveaway. You must use the deposit code LG2012 when making your deposit in order to be credited the free LG-2012-Giveaway ticket.

The welcome deposit bonus at 888 Poker is a 100% match, up to $400. So to earn the maximum $400 bonus you must deposit $400 into your new 888 Poker account. In addition to this bonus and the free LG-2012-Giveaway ticket, you’ll also gain entry into a free ticket as well into a $50K First Depositors’ Challenge, a $1,000 Depositors Freeroll and seven $500 First Depositors’ Freerolls, plus a chance to win a $100K First Depositors’ Freeroll entry if you join 888 Poker and make your first deposit between Thursday, any Thursday, at 23:00 GMT and the following Wednesday at 22:59 GMT.

And now don’t forget to use the bonus LG2012 to get that free LG-2012-Giveaway ticket.

Intertops Poker Holding 26-Day Endurance Challenge

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Intertops Poker is now holding a 26-Day Endurance Challenge with up to $42 per person in individual cash prizes and tickets into $3,250 worth Freerolls up for grabs. It lasts from December 1 to 27 and here’s how it works: earn a set target number of Frequent Player Points each day for a target number of days and earn a prize along with a freeroll tournament entry.

The minimum requirement to earn a ticket into the $750 freeroll is earning 14 FPPs per day for 5 days of the promotion. Earn the same daily FPP count for 10 days at least and you’ll meet the minimum requirement to earn a ticket into the $1,000 freeroll. Do it for 15 days or more and get into the $1,500 freeroll.

Cash prizes start at $3 for 14 FPPs a day for 20 days and go up from there. You can earn a cash prize in as little as 5 days if you earn 224 FPPs on each of those days. That prize, incidentally, is $10. You can also earn $10 for earning 112 FPPs per day for 10 days.

A particularly nice and novel feature of this promotion is that you do not have to opt-in first in order for your FPP earnings to count toward earning prizes. That means that even if you’re finding out abou this promotion mid-month, all the FPPs you’ve earned before now in December 2011 will still apply. So as long as you’ve been playing at Intertops Poker in December 2011, you’re already entered and competing in the 26-Day Endurance Race.

Bet Online Poker Offers Tournament Bonus Guarantee

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Bet Online Poker is one of the only poker sites around that offers players a tournament bonus guarantee. It is literally a bonus that you can specifically use to enter Bet Online Poker’s guaranteed tournaments. To qualify, players must make a minimum deposit of $50. For every $50 deposited, Bet Online will give you 200 Promo Bucks. The maximum amount of Promo Bucks you can earn is 4,000. Deposits made through any method are eligible except for those made through Book-to-Book, which are not.

Promo Bucks are not instantly awarded. Once earned, players must request the Promo Bucks they have coming to them in order for BetOnline Poker to issue them. This is as easy as sending an email that says “Poker promobucks please.” To freeplay@betonline.com, including your username and the amount of your deposit. Promo Bucks will then be issued to your account within a 24-hour period affter receiving your request.

Promo Bucks can then be used to cover the buy-in costs to Bet Online Poker’s guaranteed tournaments. The site offers $150,000 worth of guaranteed tournaments each month. Promo Bucks are not exchangeable for cash.

This is in addition to Bet Online’s regular Lifetime Bonus that promises you a 25% match on each and every reload deposit you make into your BetOnline account as long as you’re a real money player there.

The Lifetime Bonus and the Tournament Bonus Guarantee are just two more of the bonuses at Bet Online that are unlike those offered at almost any other site.

Get a Piece of Cake Poker’s Holiday Action

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Cake Poker is running several special promotions in honor of the coming holidays, including a $50,000 Gold Card Tournament Wrap-Up Series, Merry Match & Win Game Boards, Turbo Tuesdays and December Gold Chip Tournaments.

For the December 2011 Gold Card promotion, Cake Poker has quadrupled the opportunities players have to win. Each week is represented by a different suit, with a different suited Gold Card final tournament each week and a different Match and Win Game board each week (more on that in a moment.) Prize pools for these finals range from $5K for the first week, Clubs, to $20K for the last week, Spades. Diamonds and Hearts are $10K and $15K, respectively. You can even use Gold Cards that you get from Cake Poker’s The Exchange to enter Daily Gold Card Satellites and win a seat in that week’s final.

Throughout December, Cake Poker will hold Turbo Tuesdays, an opportunity to earn even more Gold Cards than usual, even for a Turbo Gold Card promotion. Most Turbo Gold Card promotions past offer double the Gold Cards but Turbo Tuesdays offers three times the Gold Cards during the hours of 0:00 GMT to 23:59 PT. That’s December 6, 13, 20 and 27.

Also for December 2011, Cake Poker will be offering more Gold Chip Satellite Tournament than usual. Besides the Gold Chip Sit and Go tournaments normally offered, there will also be multi-table tourmaments with Gold Chip buy-ins. The top 5 players from each Gold Chip Satellite Tournament will advance to a weekly $15K Guaranteed main event or a $25K Guaranteed main event, both taking place every Sunday.

Scandal Arises from Ultimate Bet

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poker hackerEvery poker player out there has heard of the online poker site Ultimate Bet.  The site was surrounded by scandal, and eventually was done in after Black Friday.  While the bulk of the attention went towards Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, Ultimate Bet wasn’t far behind in terms of a scandal.  While Full Tilt and Stars owed their players quite a bit of money, Ultimate Bet owed money as well, but at this point players have essentially given up on any chances of getting that money back.  Once Black Friday had come and gone, players on UB had hoped that this was the end of the bad news.  Unfortunately it hasn’t come to an end just yet, as their was recently a new scandal that has come out of the wood works about the site.

It seems that someone went on to the large poker forum Two Plus Two, and released a large amount of personal data that related to different players’ accounts on Ultimate Bet.  The data was deleted with the post around 8 minutes after all was said and done, but players who clicked the link could get all of the information and store it to their computer within that time frame.  The list of things included that were given as far as personal information were things such as their Ultimate Bet screen name, full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, account balance, IP address, deposit methods used on the site, birth date, account number on Ultimate Bet (not bank accounts or credit cards), VIP status, affiliate status, and blacklist status.

It’s obviously very fortunate that this information did not include any type of bank account or credit/debit card number, and also that there were no social security numbers listed.  If this information was given it could cause some serious issues, and you can bet that the scandal would be quite a bit worse than it is right now.

Ultimate Bet has faltered quite a bit, and is actually pretty fortunate that the scandal around Full Tilt Poker has overshadowed their site.  The total list of accounts and information that were released topped 3.5 million, and over 2 million of those accounts came from the United States.

Poker Stars Reveals Last Two 10th Anniversary Promos

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Pokerstars has now revealed all ten of its 10th Anniversary promotions with the last two to be revealed: the Road to the 72 Billionth Hand and Cash Prize Week for the Battle of the Planets Sit & Gos.

The Road to the 72 Billionth Hand is actually the latest Mega Milestone stop of the larger Road to 100 Billion Hands promotion Poker Stars has been running for a while now. Between hands 71.7 billion and 72 billion, every billion hands, Pokerstars will award cash prizes to players dealt into that hand, even if they fold. The winner of each milestone hand wins the biggest prize. The winner of the Mega Milestone 72 billionth hand wins $10,000.

Then there’s Cash Prize Week for the Battle of the Planets Sit and Gos that run regularly at the site. The dates are December 11 – 17, 2011, and here’s how it works. Battle of the Planets is a leaderboard promotion with a low-stakes, or low-orbit, and high-stakes, or high-orbit, leaderboard for eight different Sit and Go tournaments with varying buy-ins and prize pools. Get on the leaderboard by playing in at least 20 of these. Earning a certain Target Score over the course of Cash Prize Week entitles a player to a $10,000 cash prize. For example, in Mercury division, beat 650 points on the low-orbit leaderboard or 2,000 on the high-orbit leaderboard and you win. In addition, the regular prize pools for all Battle of the Planets tournaments will be doubled for all of Cash Prize Week. So for the Jupiter division, for example, the regular $10,000 prize pools will be doubled to $20,000.

Poker Stars Latest World Record Attempt Successful

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Poker Stars has succeeded in once again holding the biggest online poker tournament, based on the number of players registered. There were 200,000 in all, this time, and there would have been more if technical issues hadn’t capped the potential pool at 200,000, the target number to set a new record, according to Ondrej Drebota, Manager of the Czech Republic PokerStars.com. The previous record was set by Poker Stars as well, on December 2009, for 149,196 players.

The ceremony celebrating this latest world record was held at the site of the EPT Prague, which is taking place now. Poker Stars’ WCOOP Radio broadcast the tournament live, which took place at the same time as the world record ceremony, Sunday the 4th of December, 2011.

When the 200,000 player tournament started, it crashed the PokerStars servers, causing all the other tournaments taking place at the site at that time to be held up for 20 minutes.

The game lasted seven hours and change. First place went to a player going by “sokoluk1991”, who, for his $1 buy-in, took down a $40,258.83 first prize. Runner-up, for $34,000, was “Kaitz20”.

This event also marked the start of the 10th Anniversary festivities taking place at PokerStars throughout the rest of the year. It features ten promotions in all, eight of which have already been detailed earlier in these pages. The last two 10th Anniversary promotions – special cash prizes for the Battle of the Planets Sit ‘n’ Gos and a 72 Billionth Hand bonus – will be featured tomorrow.

PokerStars Breaks Record for Online Poker Tournament

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PokerStars is not only the largest online poker site online, but is also the only one of the three online poker sites to overcome Black Friday and continue to bring in impressive results.  The online poker site also held the record for the largest online poker tournament in history, and just this month they decided to attempt to break their own world record once again.  The site placed a cap on the tournament, which featured a $1 buy-in and $250k in the guaranteed prize pool.  The numbers were so high that they brought in an incredible 200,000 players, which is even more amazing considering the fact that they were in the United States market when they originally broke the record.

As if the 200k players wasn’t impressive enough, take into consideration that this number was hit more than three hours before the tournament actually began.  Based on the old numbers, if PokerStars was still in the US market, there is a very realistic chance that this number could have hit 300k in total players, which would have been absurd.

The old record that PokerStars set was 149,196 players, and was set around two years ago, back on December 27, 2009.  It was seen that this number was actually passed in the pre-registration period, many days before the tournament even began.  It’s not much of a surprise that the players were eliminated incredibly fast from this tournament, as many players went for the “go all-in and either double up, or go home” method, since it was only a $1 tournament.  This meant that the players were in the cash only 2 and a half hours into the event.  This meant there was 12,150 players left, and the first payouts were $4.  The first place prize was set at $50k, but the players had a bit of work to do in order to outlast 12k more players.

While it was a nice feeling for everyone who made the money to get into it so quickly, they weren’t nearly as fortunate when it came down to finding an eventual winner.  It took five additional hours for a champion to be found, and a deal was actually made over three handed play as well.  The deal gave the first place winner $40,258.83, and he played by the name of sokoluk1991.  Second place went to Kaitz20, and this player took down $34k for their efforts.  Third place was a player who played under the name King-2-Z, and they took home $25,741.17.  Not a bad deal for just a $1 investment eh?