If you’re looking for some trouble, you might find what you’re looking for over at Lock Poker, where the site has launched Double Trouble Fridays, giving players double the points going into the weekend.
From now on, Lock Poker will kick off each weekend with Double Trouble Fridays, in which every VIP player on the site will automatically earn twice the player points they normally would playing at Lock Poker’s cash games. What’s more, so that players can take instant advantage of these new influxes of points, Lock Poker will be releasing the double points directly into player’s accounts every quarter hour.
Lock Poker has four different VIP levels, all of which are eligible for Double Trouble Fridays. You gain access to the first level, White VIP, as soon as you earn at least 1,000 VIP Points in a calender month. White VIP players enjoy a $1K Monthly Freeroll and 10% cash back daily. Silver VIP is next, for players earning at least 5,000 points per month. Silver players get access to a $2,000 monthly freeroll and 20% cash back. Rewards increase similarly from there for Black VIP, for 10,000 points per month, and Black VIP, for 50,000 points per month.
All VIP players also get VIP Vault Access and a cash redemption rate of $10 for every 1,000 VIP points.
You must keep up with your monthly minimum points earnings to maintain your VIP status level. Players can go down status levels or lose VIP status altogether for missing a month’s minimum points requirement.
Next year’s PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) will feature an additional main event in the form of the 8th installation of the World Cup Poker. All the action will occur in the Bahamas’ Atlantis Resort from January 5th to 15th of 2012. And Poker Stars is giving its players numerous opportunities to find themselves there in the center of the action for nothing, or close to it.
Unlike the PCA main event, the World Cup of Poker is a league, or teams poker, event. Last year, the Italian team, led by Luca Pagano, a PokerStars pro, claimed the cup, beating out runners-up, the UK team, led by Liv Boeree. This time around, seven countries will be competing for the World Cup of Poker, and PokerStars players can win seats to be a part of their country’s team (after putting up a part of the registration fee).
First players submit to a round of qualifier tournaments. The top performers from each region will compete in knockout tournaments to complete a four-person team representing each region. In keeping with the traditions of the real World Cup, that is of football (or soccer to Americans), ach four-person team will include a PokerStars pro as Captain, a defender, midfielder, striker and goalkeeper.
On Poker Stars’ WCP Qualifiers web page, you can find when the Saturday-Sunday qualifier for your region or nation is taking place. First-time depositors can vie for the midfielder position, earning an $11 stage one entry by using the code WCP8 when making that deposit.
As for the rest of the positions, the goalkeeper qualifier is a freeroll. The qualifier for the defender position is $1.10 and, of course, midfielder is $11. To try for the striker position you must have been a top finisher on last year’s Tournament Leader Board, in which case you will receive a special invitation to the qualifier.
65 countries will start out the Poker Stars World Cup of Poker VIII competition, but only 7 countries will make it to stage 3 at the 2012 PCA.
On August 22, 2011, California State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg sent a letter announcing that the bills to legalize intra-state Internet poker would not be voted on this year. The letter was also signed by Sen. Roderick D. Wright, Chair of the Governmental Organization Committee, and author of one of the bills.
Both legislators made it clear they are in favor of Internet gaming; just not now.
Anyone receiving the letter knew it was going to be bad news from the start. It opens with Dear Stakeholder; not exactly the warm salutation you would expect from sophisticated politicians.
Sen. Steinberg told the Sacramento Bee that, although he personally supports legalizing Internet gambling in California,he does not want any legislative action on the issue this year.
Why the delay? After admitting that the issue has been studied for the past three years, including numerous hearings and hours of testimony over the last several months, Senators Steinberg and Wright declare:
Despite these efforts, significant, unresolved issues remain, including tribal exclusivity and waiver of sovereign immunity, the types of games that would be authorized, who would be eligible to apply for gaming site licenses and potential federal constitutional questions.
The State Legislature goes into Interim Study Recess on Sept. 9. [W]e fully expect an objective proposal will be developed during the interim… The G.O. Committee will hold a hearing in January 2012.
Do lawmakers in Sacramento really need another half-year to study the issues?
For the record, the State Legislature spent only a few days deciding that California should have legal landbased casinos. A senior Assembly staff member told the Los Angeles Times how Prop. 1A and the model compact passed in 1999:
It was a stacked deck. It just sailed through both houses in three days without a single genuine public hearing, with hurry-up legislative hearings often held in out-of-the-way conference rooms, and after hours of closed-door negotiations between the governor, legislators and Indian representatives.
But, maybe the legal issues involving Internet gambling are more complicated than those surrounding Nevada-style tribal casinos. Unfortunately, none of the remaining “unresolved issues” seem all that difficult to resolve:
1) Tribal exclusivity. If that is an issue, there is nothing more to discuss. A few California tribes have taken the position that their compacts with the state, giving them the exclusive right to have slot machines in return for revenue sharing, mean no one else can operate Internet poker. Their reasoning is that a home personal computer becomes a slot machine if used for online betting. If that were true, the state would already be in breach for having authorized at-home wagering on horse races. Also, this is probably an argument most tribes would not want to win, because California would then have no reason not to authorize highly-taxed, privately-owned landbased casinos.
2) Waiver of sovereign immunity. The state has signed dozens of compacts with tribes for both casinos and off-track betting. There is no reason for waivers for online poker to be any different from those prior compacts.
3) The types of games. Sports betting is prohibited by the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. Remote betting on horse racing is already legal in California. No one is seriously thinking about competing against the California State Lottery, one of the largest in the world. Bingo is limited to charities and tribes, and would require an amendment to the California Constitution to allow private operators. Casino gaming is also limited by the Constitution to federally recognized tribes. So the only game that could attract competitive bids from cardclubs and outside corporations is poker.
4) Who would be eligible to apply. This is obviously the big money question. Politically, at least one of the licenses has to go to a consortium of tribes, and one to a consortium of cardclubs. But politicians are looking at legalizing online poker not to protect local operators, but to raise money, because the state is desperate for revenue. So, at least one license has to go to an outside company with more money than any California operator, such as Caesars or Bwin/party. The only question is whether there will be a limited number of at least three licenses, or unlimited to any operator with enough money.
5) Potential federal constitutional questions. This is probably a reference to the position by the Department of Justice under Pres. George W. Bush that even intra-state Internet poker violates the Wire Act. Since then, courts have ruled that the Wire Act does not apply to poker. But, if intra-state poker violates federal law, there is nothing more to discuss.
So, why the delay? Maybe the senators really do have questions like these, which could be answered quickly by any competent gaming lawyer. Or maybe they are still trying to negotiate the political fight among various tribal factions, cardclubs, tracks and others over how many licenses will be issued, and to whom.
But, the Sacramento Bee may have been the first to publish what a lot of us have been thinking. An editorial on August 19, 2011, three days before the Dear Stakeholder letter, began:
Whether or not they are in support or opposition, lawmakers are unlikely to take decisive action until the last possible moment on two bills to legalize Internet poker and other forms of gambling in California.
Why?
These two bills are the ultimate juice bills of the session. Indian tribes and other groups on various sides of this issue are spending huge sums on lobbying, campaign contributions and consulting. The more this issue drags out and the more that lawmakers can gin up drama and stress over it the more money will flow through the Capitol.
The Bee and other newspapers have been reporting on the millions of dollars being spent on these bills. The lobbying has become so lucrative that it has even attracted such political heavyweights as former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, hired by the Morongo tribe as a consultant.
A careful reading of the letter makes it clear that the politicians in Sacramento want additional input: Toward that end we strongly encourage you, as a Stakeholder, to be actively engaged during the interim in helping craft this objective proposal.
And Stakeholders should be prepared to write additional checks in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Next year is the presidential election, and one-third of the California Senate and 100% of the State Assembly seats will be decided. So the few million dollars that are being spent on Internet poker will be unnoticed in the coming flood of political solicitations and donations.
If Internet gambling is not made legal in California next year, the bills have to be introduced, again, in 2013. The California Legislature meets in two-year sessions. Bills like this, even without the incentive of big money donations to drag things out, are only voted on in even years.
The second season of the Grand Series of Poker Live is underway and it features $2 buy-ins, side events and activities around the clock at world-class casinos in 4 hot gambling destinations including home of the Manchester United, Old Trafford Stadium, and a grand finale taking place in the Dominican Republic. And you can earn seats in all four upcoming GSOP Live 2 tour events plus luxury accommodations at Euro Poker.
The Euro Poker GSOP Live 2 satellite series starts with qualifier tournaments as cheap to enter as $2 + $0.20 or you can skip the qualifier stages and buy-in to the satellites themselves for the direct buy-in of $300 + $30.
Euro Poker also features Super Steps qualifiers with a coinflip format promising 3 prize packages awarded weekly. Step 1 costs $1 + $0.05 to enter; step 2 costs $14 + $0.70 to enter; and step 3 costs $200 + $10 to enter.
Euro Poker is giving away 50 prize packages in all into the GSOP Live 2, with $3,000 prize packages into the events in the GSOP Live Manchester in England in August, GSOP Live Porto Carras in Greece in October, GSOP Live Prague in December and GSOP Live Salzburg in February, and $5,000 prize packages to the GSOP Live Dominican Republic grand final.
And for all you poker players and fans unable to make it to season 2 GSOP Live event, live GSOP bloggers will be present at each event commenting on each and every hand played. View our Euro Poker Review for more.
Doyles Room Poker is offering players a variety of routes to this year’s Punta Cana Poker Classic.
Starting July 9 and running every other Saturday since then, Doyles Room Poker has been holding a Punta Cana Poker Classic Super Satellite. Starting at 6 pm ET, these events have buy-ins of $70+7 but you can earn a seat at one of several satellites with much lower buy-ins.
At fifteen minutes before each hour 9am-6pm a $1 Punta Cana Satellite Turbo Freezeout for a $1+0.10 buy-in. At a quarter to noon, a quarter to 3 pm and a quarter to 6 pm ET is a $0.25 Punta Cana Satellite R&A Turbo for a $0.25+0.02 buy-in. At 9 pm and 10 pm ET is a Punta Cana 1 Seat GTD Turbo Satellite with a $8+0.80 buy-in. All satellites into the Punta Cana Classic Super Satellite run Monday through Friday.
There are also a bevy of Punta Cana Satellites running between 1 pm and 5:30 pm Saturdays for buy-ins ranging from $4+0.40 to $10+1, several with 3 seats in the Super Satellite guaranteed.
There are also several Satellites running 7 pm to 12 am on Saturdays for the next Punta Cana Super Satellite.
Each $3.5K prize package includes the $1,500+150 buy-in into the Punta Cana Poker Classic 2011 main event, 5 nights at the Hard Rock, transportation from and to the airport, food and beverage services all included, access to a variety of cash games, side events and casino games, $1.5K to spend at the hotel on amenities and airfare up to $500.
For the 26 days running between 04:00 GMT on August 26 and 03:59 GMT on September 21, 2011, Intertops Poker is giving players the chance to earn prizes up to $42 cash and entry into freeroll tournaments worth up to $1,500. They’re calling it, appropriately, the 26-Day Endurance Challenge and all you have to do to participate is play as you normally do at Intertops Poker, accumulating Frequent Player Points as you do so. Earn enoug frequent player points per day for enough days of the challenge and you automatically win a prize.
The smallest cash prize is $3, earned by acquiring 14 FPPs per day for $20 days. For the largest cash prize of $42, earn 224 FPPs per day for 20 days of the promotion. Earn 224 FPPs per day for 5 days of the promotional period, 112 FPPs per day for 10 days or 56 FPPs per day for 20 days and get $10 cash.
All cash prizes also come with freeroll entries. Reach any 5-day target and gain entry into the $750 freeroll; reach any 10-day target and gain entry into the $1,000 freeroll; reach any 15-day or 20-day target and gain entry into the $1,500 freeroll. All freerolls take place at 22:59 GMT on Sunday, September 25, 2011.
Both cash and freeroll prizes are not cumulative, meaning that you only win one freeroll entry and one cash prize maximum in the Intertops Poker 26-Day Endurance Challenge, claiming the highest possible prizes for which you qualify.
A member of the Merge Gaming Network, Felt Stars Poker at FeltStars.eu is host of the World Championship of Internet Poker (WCOIP) and claims to offer the biggest bad beat jackpot in history. In addition, besides offering the usual variety of multi-player poker games, FeltStars also offers casino games like blackjack, roulette, video poker and Caribbean stud, with a progressive jackpot. The stated FeltStars mission is to offer the safest and user-friendliest online poker and gaming experience as possible.
Among the promotions running at FeltStars Poker is a $500 freeroll for first time depositors. New players at Felt Stars get an open ticket to 14 days worth of these exclusive daily events. They also get a 150% first deposit bonus up to a $750 maximum bonus. The famed “largest bad beat jackpot in history” has a low minimum hand of quad 7s and a high pot contribution of 50 cents from every pot. Felt Stars also has a big royal flush bonus of 100 times the big blind.
Every Sunday, Felt Stars hosts a $100,000 Guaranteed Tournament with a $100 + $9 direct buy-in and satellites starting at 110 VIP Points. Felt Stars also hosts satellites into events in the World Poker Tour, World Series of Poker, Aussie Millions and Asia Pacific Poker Tour. Satellite buy-ins start at a low $2 and prize packages are valued at as high as $15,000.
Felt Stars maintains a Sit n Go leaderboard and a Tourney King leaderboard to track and reward top performance in online poker tournament play.
DoylesRoom Poker is back, now located at DoylesRoom.ag and all this month the site that lost its “dot com” and its U.S. player base in one fell swoop back on Black Friday is racing players to big end of summer prize, specifically with its $25,000 Points Race and its Free Parking promotion.
In the $25,000 Points Race you’re not only racing other players, but you’re also racing the clock to earn as many points as you can playing at Doyles Room tables and tournaments before August 31, 2011 winds out.
Place 139th through 200th on the race leaderboard and you get $25 for your efforts. Place first on the leaderboard and get $4,000. Second place gets $2,000; third gets $1,500; fourth gets $1,200; and fifth gets $1,000.
Doyles Room will also give you cash for participating in its Frequent Player Free Parking promotion, or FPP Free Parking. In this contest you race nobody but yourself and the clock, earning as many FPPs as you can before the end of the month. Earn 25,000 FPPs in August and get $25. Each another 25,000 FPPs and get another $25. The next prize up, for earning 1000,000 more FPPs, is $100. Then, for 200,000 more FPPs, you’ll get $200. You get $500 for earning another 500,000 FPPs and, finally, $1,000 more for 1 million more FPPs. The FPP requirements are cumulative, but then again, so are the prize, giving you the possibility of collecting $1,850 for earning 1,850,000 FPPs.
After August is up, don’t be too surprised to see new races similar to these starting in September. Now that DoylesRoom Poker is back in business, we’ll tell you all about what’s coming up next there once it’s announced.
It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows.
That has always been true for opponents of expanded legal gambling.
In 1998, Don Siegelman was elected governor of Alabama, one of only two Democrats to beat incumbent Republican governors that year. The center piece of his campaign was a state lottery for education.
Yet, the voters of Alabama rejected the idea the next year, 54-46.
The campaign against creating a state lottery was one of the nastiest in memory. Where did the church groups get much of the million dollars they spent telling Alabama voters about the evils of legal gambling? From Mississippi casinos.
Existing gaming operators have always been willing to team up with opponents of all gambling to stomp out competitors.
But there seems to be a new trend: Now it is proponents of expansion who are finding the most unexpected allies.
It is not hard to see why Barney Frank (D.-MA) could work with Ron Paul (R.-TX) to try to legalize Internet poker in 2008. Frank is often as much a libertarian as a liberal. He believes government should stay out of people’s homes.
And Paul is not really a conservative, like every other member of the GOP in the House of Representatives. He, also, is a libertarian. At a presidential candidate debate, he came out in favor of legalizing heroin and prostitution. So allowing people to gamble is, for him, actually rather tame.
The few libertarians and pure fiscal conservatives left in the GOP, like darkhorse presidential candidate, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, naturally believe adults should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to gamble. And former Republican office holders, like the Poker Players Alliance’s Alfonse D’Amato and FairPlayUSA’s Tom Ridge, who created the silly terrorist threat levels color codes, are always available if the price is right.
But, how do we explain social conservatives supporting legal gambling? The tea party and other Big Brother types want government in the wedding chapel, bedroom and doctor’s office, particularly if you are female. Yet, Joe Barton (R.-TX) introduced a bill this year to legalize internet poker. Barton is so far right that he actually publicly apologized to BP for President Barack Obama daring to investigate BP’s disastrous Gulf oil spill.
Barney Frank signed on as a co-sponsor; probably the only time he will be working with Barton this year, or any year.
Frank also reintroduced his own Internet gambling legalization bill. Since the GOP now controls the House, he needed a Republican co-author. He found one in John Campbell (R.-CA).
Meanwhile, the leaders of both parties in the Senate sent the U.S. Attorney General a letter that many see as an indication that they also might be considering legalization. The fact that the authors could agree on even a letter is itself amazing.
Harry Reid is the Majority Leader and a moderate Democrat. He represents Nevada, which makes him pro-gambling. Jon Kyl (R.-AZ) is a conservative Republican, a redundancy since all but two Republicans (from Maine) in the Senate are conservative. He is the GOP Whip, the second most powerful Republican. More significantly, he is so opposed to Internet gambling that his name has become synonymous with efforts to outlaw it, as in “the Kyl bill.”
But reading between the lines, the only thing Reid and Kyl agree on is that Internet poker should be operated only by their constituents: Landbased casino companies (Reid) or Indian casino tribes (Kyl).
Are conservative Republicans really becoming pro-gambling? There are a few Tea-Party-types who actually believed their own rhetoric, that everything is a state issue. Rick Perry (R.-TX) said it was OK with him if New York legalized gay marriage – at least, that was his position before he entered the race for president.
Maybe it is wrong to view legal gaming as a partisan issue. After all, the liberal Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend — and you can’t get more Democratic than a Kennedy — ran and lost the governor’s race in 2002 in Maryland in part by opposing slot machines at racetracks.Ironically, the Republican candidate, Robert Ehrlich, who strongly backed racinos to solve the state’s budget crisis, never succeeded. For eight years, the Maryland State Legislature kept killing the proposal. But it wasn’t due to any anti-gambling ideology. The fights were always about who was going to get the money.
Money is, of course, what is driving the latest pushes for legalization. Gambling is seen as a voluntary tax. Every time there is an economic crisis, lawmakers and governors turn to authorizing more gambling as an easy way to raise revenue.
There is so much legal gambling that proposals that would have been considered outrageous just a few years ago don’t even raise eyebrows. Remember when there was no legal gambling in any major American city, other than Las Vegas? Then came the temporary casino in New Orleans in 1995 and the passage of Proposition E in 1996, allowing three casinos in Detroit.
The Michigan election was historic. Never before had the voters approved high-stakes casinos in the face of active opposition.
Now there are casinos in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, put there by the state legislature. Most significantly, casinos are being built in the four largest cities in Ohio, approved by votes of the people.
There is so much legal gambling in the U.S. that it is easy for politicians to say, “We’ve already got casinos, racetracks and a state lottery. What’s the big deal about Internet poker?” Of course, there is so much legal gambling in the U.S. that those casino and racetrack owners, and even the state lottery, respond, “Internet poker is fine, as long as we get to run it.”
Today, the major opposition to expanding legal gambling comes from existing operators, and they don’t particularly care which political party is in power. That is not to say that ideology plays no role.
One-third of the electorate will always be against legal gambling. They are mostly from the religious right, and they always vote. So, special and off-year elections spell doom for proposals for new gaming.
As Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Ralph Nader demonstrate, the far left also has a few gambling opponents. They are mostly paternalistic, believing poor people should not be gambling or drinking beer or buying hamburgers.
Although the country is growing ever more polarized, the good news for proponents is that gambling is becoming a non-issue. Those of us who are involved in it every day can lose sight of the fact that most politicians don’t know or care about the issue. And, apparently, even the religious right is losing interest.
On November 2, 2010, the voters in Iowa removed three sitting justices of the State Supreme Court, because they had ruled in favor of same sex marriage. How did this religious conservative landslide affect legal gaming? Votes in favor of casinos went up in all 14 counties in Iowa, from an average of 74% in 2002 to 78.8% in 2010.
Joe Barton has not been condemned for coming out in favor of Internet poker. Conservative groups like Focus on the Family used to instantly orchestrate mass letter-writing campaigns against any proposal for expansion of gambling. It was unthinkable that a conservative Republican would actually author such a bill.
Today, the states are desperate for money. And gambling is increasingly being seen as just another way to raise revenue, without raising taxes.
Palladium VIP members aren’t the only players at Party Poker eligible for free tickets to this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany. (See our earlier post onOktoberfest VIP for information on that promotion.) You can also win free tickets to the festivities if you live in Austria, Germany or Switzerland. Party Poker is offering six prize packages to the 2011 Oktoberfest celebrations, set aside soley for players residing in that area.
Between August 15 and September 18, Austrian, German and Swiss players at Party Poker can enter two different points races and one freeroll tournament to take their best shot at one of these Oktoberfest 2011 prize packages, which include a two-night stay at a five-star hotel, activities of your choice during the daytime, private areas for dinner and/or drinks in reserved areas at an exclusive night club and the Oktoberfest tent, invite to a private poker tourney, complete transportation during your stay and more.
Race 1 is from August 15 to 26 and race 2 is from September 3 to 14. Opt-in to the race you wish to enter and then start collecting as many PartyPoints as you can in the time allowed. The progress of the most successful contestants will be monitored on a leaderboard posted on the site. The two best performers in each race will win Oktoberfest prize packages while the remainder of the top ten will win cash. The player who earns the most PartyPoints over the course of both races will also win a 2011 Oktoberfest prize package.
To enter the 2011 Oktoberfest PartyPoker freeroll, either be a new player making a first deposit into your real money account between August 15 and September 15 or, if you’re already a player at PartyPoker, collect 25 PartyPoints in that same time frame.
On August 22, 2011, California State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg sent a letter announcing that the bills to legalize intra-state Internet poker would not be voted on this year. The letter was also signed by Sen. Roderick D. Wright, Chair of the Governmental Organization Committee, and author of one of the bills.
It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows.