Bet Online Poker’s Pop Points loyalty program offers real cash rewards. As with the rewards programs of other poker sites, at BetOnline you earn Pop Points each time you play in a raked hand in a cash game on the site or pay a fee to register for an online tournament. You can then convert these points into cash by using them to register for the $500 POP2Cash tournaments, a weekly event with a guaranteed monthly prize pool of $150,000.
Buy-ins for these POP2Cash tournaments vary from event to event, although at any one you can pay the respective buy-in using cash or promo bucks.
In the meantime, Bet Online also holds special Hit & Run Freeroll tournaments that cost nothing at all to enter, although many of these events do have the option of paying for rebuys and add-ons.
In addition to offering 24/7 online poker action, BetOnline is also a Sportsbook, Racebook and online casino.
When you join BetOnline you will enjoy a Better Bonus Guarantee that promises to either meet or beat the terms of any bonus offer currently out there. This deposit bonus does, however, have a minimum deposit of $100 and a maximum bonus of $900. Members playing or betting on any of BetOnline’s offerings will also enjoy a Guaranteed Lifetime Bonus of 25% free play on all deposits, with only a 10x rollover requirement.
Last week we introduced you to the more than $150,000 in guaranteed tournaments at BetOnline each month an ongoing 25% freeplay tournament bonus guarantee. Today we bring you the POP points program, including the weekly $500 POP2Cash tournaments, and ongoing Hit & Run Freerolls. All told it constitutes several good reasons to give this new player in the online gambling world a look-see.
On Friday, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) announced that it has granted Full Tilt Poker a renewal of its Secondary Client Provider Authorization (Secondary CPA). Over a month ago, Full Tilt Poker had its primary license suspended by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) and has not been open for business for anyone in the world. No one is entirely sure that this means for Full Tilt Poker but we do have to question what the KGC is thinking. Below is the statement released by the KGC.
The Commission has granted an application to renew the Secondary Client Provider Authorization (“Secondary CPA”) held by Kolyma Corporation A.V.V. (“Kolyma”), operating as “Full Tilt Poker”, effective August 1, 2011 for a term of two (2) years.
To maintain a Secondary CPA, a licensee must maintain a valid licence to operate interactive gaming that has been issued by a comparable jurisdiction (the “primary jurisdiction”). Accordingly, the Commission is closely monitoring the proceedings being conducted by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (the “AGCC”) concerning the eGambling Licences held by Filco Limited, operating as “Full Tilt Poker”. The AGCC has confirmed to the Commission that, although the eGambling Licences held by Filco Limited are presently suspended pending the outcome of a hearing, these licences are still considered to be valid.
Presently, Full Tilt Poker is not offering gaming to the public, or accepting player deposits, from servers that are located within Kahnawake or under the Commission’s supervision.
Luvin Poker will be running Girls Night In, Hosted by LIPS every first Monday night of every month with $100 Freerolls at 9 pm EST under the freeroll tab. The first game is this Monday, August 1st!
Prizes will be added to the prize pool. No deposit is necessary and they’re definitely looking for BRAGGING RIGHTS!
This August, 2011, Cake Poker introduces the $60,000 Gold Club Tournaments Series, comprising dozens of tournaments with big prize pools and Gold Card buy-ins. The total cash prize pool guaranteed in the Gold Club Tournament Series over the course of the month is $45,000 with an additional $15,000 Finale Freeroll open to all Cake Poker players who compete in at least 10 of the series’ events.
There will be no cash buy-ins for any of the tournaments in this series; only Gold Cards. More, only Gold Cards suited clubs are eligible for entry into these events. It only takes one Gold Card to enter any given event, but it has to be the right Gold Card. Sometimes the Gold Card Series matters as well, with some entries open to Gold Cards from all series (such as any year’s 7 of clubs) and others open only to Gold Cards from a certain year (such as the ’09 series 7 of clubs).
All Gold Card tournaments start at 22:00 GMT, or 6 pm EST. The festivities begin on Thursday, August 4 with a $5,000 guaranteed tournament with a buy-in of any series 2 of clubs Gold Card. One Gold Card Tournament Series event takes place every day, seven days a week, after that, through the end of August, with each Wednesday’s event being another $5,000 guaranteed. The $15,000 Finale Freeroll then takes place on Friday, September 2.The prize pool in the $15,000 Finale Freeroll will be divided evenly among the top 3 finishers, each getting $5,000 for their efforts.
Winners of satellite tournaments into the latest Eureka Poker Tour, Eureka Zagreb, will not only get a free seat in the live event worth €1,400. They will also get to meet 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event winner, and the man who paved the way for online poker amateurs to take on professional live championship poker, Chris Moneymaker. What’s more, one of these lucky satellite winners will also get the chance to play against Chris Moneymaker heads-up in a €1,000 buy-in event.
Poker Stars is giving away four Eureka Zagreb prize packages. Freeroll and cash entry satellites into the Weekly Final satellites at which the prize packages will be awarded are running around the clock at the site. In addition, all players to reach one of the weekly finals will also be invited back to play in the Grand Final, at which the heads-up seat opposited Chris Moneymaker will also be awarded. In addition the Grand Final has a €2,000 guaranteed cash prize pool, which the regular weekly finals also have an added €1,000 cash prize pool.
Players can enter one of the Weekly Finals in one of several ways. The freeroll path runs Mondays through Saturdays, July 25 through August 12 with the top 50 winning seats in the Freezeout Qualifier. The Freezeout Qualifier has a €1.10 direct buy-in and runs Mondays through Sundays, July 25 through August 13, awarding the top 9 finishers seats in the weekly final. Alternatively, there’s a €3.30 Rebuy Qualifier running the same days, with the same guaranteed awards.
Eureka Zagreb weekly finals take place Sundays, July 31 and August 7 and 14, while the grand final takes place Tuesday, August 16.
The question is not if, but when: What will happen when the biggest land-based gaming companies start competing for real on the Internet?
We already know the answer, from looking at what has happened in every other industry. There is a natural progression, starting with any new invention. It does not matter if it is automobiles at the dawn of the 20th century; radio, movies and television from the 1920s to the 1960s; or computers, more recently. And it makes no difference if the invention is a “true” patented contraption, like the camera or the photocopier, or merely an idea whose time has come, like casinos on land or poker on the Internet.
Inventors and entrepreneurs are the first to grab onto any breakthrough. The first efforts of these garage inventors are not always the most graceful. For example, the first computerized bingo machines were raw cathode-ray tubes with wires. I was sure I would get electrocuted if I touched it.
Once the invention is shown to not actually kill people, partnerships and small companies, commonly called mom-and-pop operators, hop onboard. These small start-ups grab a large share of the market, because the big boys have not yet caught on.
If the idea is a good one, and the execution is competent, these small companies start making money and growing. But, soon, corporations, with greater access to capital for expansion and marketing, begin to dominate the business. Sole proprietorships and partnerships are consigned to niche markets.
At some point the business finally attract the attention of large international companies. They have the means to buy up their competitors. It’s called consolidation, but what it really means is, if the law allows, conglomerates will take over just about everything, leaving only crumbs for smaller, local operators.
Land-based gaming has already gone through its waves of consolidation. There are 30 major casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Most are owned by only two companies: MGM Resorts International (more than a dozen casinos) and Caesars Entertainment (nearly as many). It’s a long way to the next level of ownership. The Las Vegas Sands (“LVS”) and Wynn Resorts each own two casinos on the Strip. Only a few are independent, if you can call it that, when, for example, it is a bank that got stuck with a casino: Deutsche Bank, which ended up with the Cosmopolitan.
Internet gambling is following the pattern. Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) first gave Party Gaming the World Poker Tour and then created the giant, awkwardly named bwin.party digital entertainment. Eventually, there will be only a few dominant online gaming companies in the world.
Who the survivors will be is not only unknown, but unknowable, due to the uncertainties created by shifting laws and even faster changing technology.
Caesars Entertainment, formerly Harrah’s, would be the largest Internet gambling company in the world, if only it did not have to worry about keeping its Nevada license. The company bought Binion’s Horseshoe in 2004 just to get the World Series of Poker brandname; it also kept the Horseshoe brand, but sold the actual hotel and casino. Caesars created a subsidiary, Caesars Interactive Entertainment, headquartered in Montreal, combining both its poker and online activities. It chose as its first CEO Mitch Garber, former CEO of Party Gaming. But it can’t take interstate bets from Americans, and it can’t buy up existing operators who do.
Predictions are also difficult, since some of the biggest potential players either did not exit ten years ago, or don’t exist today. Technology creates stock bubbles, which can lead to strange combinations, like AOL and Warner Bros. I would not be surprised to see M&As involving Facebook and Google, perhaps buying bwin.party or Caesars.
Powerful individuals throw in another variable, when they control giant companies. It will be entirely up to Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn to decide whether their multinational landbased casino companies, LVS and Wynn, are going to get into the field of online gaming, or not.
Of course, having one person in absolute control can cause problems beyond missing opportunities. LVS was hit with civil suits and criminal investigations, all involving allegations of wrongdoing by Adelson. Meanwhile, Steve Wynn’s announcement of his company’s earnings was lost in the uproar caused by his knocking Obama as a socialist, while praising the government of China – that’s the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China.
The land-based operators are gearing up for when they can take Internet bets from Americans. The easiest way to instantly gain expertise is to buy it. International Game Technology, one of the largest manufacturers of slot machines, paid about $115 million for Entraction Holding AB of Stockholm, Sweden. The M&A was textbook: Entraction has one of the world’s largest online poker networks and is one of the leading suppliers to the industry. Most importantly, it had never taken bets from the U.S., and will thus not cause IGT any problems with its dozens of regulators.
Caesars is more aggressive. It entered into a partnership with subsidiaries of 888 Holdings. In March, both the Nevada Gambling Control Board and the Nevada Gaming Commission declared 888 suitable. This was a significant departure from Nevada regulators’ former position, that any company that had taken bets from the U.S. was violating the law. Now 888 is considering applying for a Nevada license and planning a strategic partnership with Caesars to operate online poker, once the law allows.
Wynn took this trend to the limit, by announcing he was going to work with PokerStars to set up PokerStarsWynn.com. It was a gutsy move, since, unlike 888, PokerStars was still taking bets from the U.S. How gutsy was seen a few days later, when the federal DoJ indicted PokerStars’ principals. Naturally, Wynn cancelled his plans.
The large land-based operators understand how important it will be, to be the first online with 100% legal poker targeted at Americans. This means not only getting all regulatory approvals. The operation has to have no glitches, since players can move to a new poker room with the click of a mouse.
If laws are changed to clearly allow U.S. betting, the eventual winners will be the land-based gaming companies, or whatever conglomerate owns them at the time. The reason is simple: Success on the Internet is almost entirely due to marketing. There is nothing magical about the words Party Poker that would guarantee that it would end up with 40% of the world market, before it pulled out of the U.S. Why did Party Poker succeed, while so many other online poker companies went under? It was among the first, it had technology that worked, and it bought the rights to have its name in the middle of every table on the televised World Series of Poker.
Could even a pre-Black Friday PokerStars have competed with the brandnames and loyalty of a Caesars Palace or Harrah’s? The land-based gaming companies have player data bases with millions of names. They can offer players a lot more than free T-shirts. And, if they can’t win, they can raise corporate money to simply buy off their competitors.
But land-based operators, particularly casinos, have one enormous disadvantage: They have all the expenses connected with massive real estate holdings and tens of thousands of employees. Online casinos are cheaper to set up and cost less to maintain, even including the costs of acquiring and keeping patrons.
The big money understands that Internet gambling is simply a better investment, if it is legal. If the land-based operators can’t beat their online rivals, they can buy them.
So, welcome to the future world of mgm.bwin.party and Zynga-Caesars-888.
Bet Online Poker offers more than $150,000 worth of tournament guarantees per month plus a tournament bonus guarantee to boot. That $150K guaranteed prize pool is divided up among several of the site’s monthly guaranteed tournaments. For all guaranteed tournament buy-ins, players have a choice of paying either in cash or promo bucks.
In addition, players can earn themselves a tournament bonus on top of their 25% match lifetime bonus on every deposit made into a real money account on the site. Players receive 200 promo bucks for every $50 they deposit, with a maximum tournament bonus of 4,000 promo bucks. As mentioned above, these promo bucks can then be used to cover the buy-in costs for any Bet Online poker tournaments, including the $150,000 in monthly guaranteed tournaments. The minimum eligible deposit for the tournament bonus guarantee is $50.
Players must request their bonus promo bucks after making eligible deposits in order to be credited for them. Otherwise it will not happen automatically.
These and all Bet Online promotions are subjct to Bet Online’s general rules, including that promo bucks have no equivalent cash value are non-transferrable. Bet Online Poker also reserves the right to alter the rules of the program or revoke it altogether at their will, without notice. Players caught abusing the program may have promo bucks withheld or deducted from their accounts.
Beyond just being an online poker room, Bet Online is a complete one-stop shop for online gambling, including a sports book, horse racing betting, an online casino.
Calvin Ayre announced this morning that the Bodog Brand is leaving the US. Most players took this to mean that Bodog is leaving the US but that’s not really the case. Over the past few years the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group’s (MMGG) has been licensing the Bodog name and will continue to operate the poker and sportsbook under a new name come January 1st, 2012. We realize this is a bit confusing but for you as a player the only change will be the name of the site. All deposits/withdrawls, support and software has been operated by MMGG. in other words Bodog has had nothing to do with the site other then have it’s name on it for the past 5 years.
So to recap, the only change you will see is the name of the site. Here’s what Calvin had to say “It will mean the end of the Bodog era in the US but Morris Mohawk Gaming has been operating the brand in the US Market for the past 5 years so other than a name change it should be business as usual for US players”. There is no reason to fear this change.
For those of you who have been around for a while this is exactly like when Poker.com switched to PDCPoker.com because their leasing agreement with the owners of Poker.com expired. All that changed was the name of the site but play continued as usual.
Poker Stars just made Sunday an even better day to play online poker with the newest addition to its selection of big money tournaments known collectively as the Sunday Majors, that being the $50,000 guaranteed Sunday Cubed.
The Poker Stars Sunday Cubed launched on July 31 and now runs each and every Sunday at 5:00 ET, a time intended to attract players from New Zealand, Australia, Asia and countries East of Central Europe.
The Sunday Cubed has a buy-in of $55 + $1 and is a rebuy/add-on event, permitting one of each per player per event.
That brings to nine the full total number of tournaments in the Sunday Majors held each Sunday at Poker Stars, the others being:
• The Sunday Kickoff worth $75,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday Rebuy worth $200,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday Storm worth $200,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday 500 worth $250,000 guaranteed
• The Sundy Second Chance worth $125,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday 6-Max worth $60,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday Supersonic worth $40,000 guaranteed
• The Sunday Million worth $1 million guaranteed and a first place prize of at least $150,000
There are also big $215 buy-in tournaments every Sunday at Poker Stars in Omaha, Stud and Draw poker.
As with all Sunday Majors, Poker Stars is holding qualifier tournaments throughout each week leading up to the big event, giving players a way to enter the Sunday Cubed tournament without paying the buy-in. You’ll find the Sunday Cubed schedule and registration button under Regular in the PokerStars Tourney lobby.
Two English poker pros are the latest players to be signed to the Lock Poker team: LockPRO ELITE. Chris Moorman and Nicky Evans join Brett Jungblut, Eric Lynch and Jose Macedo as representatives of the site reputed of late to unseat the now defunct Full Tilt Poker as one of the biggest and most popular poker sites in the world.
You might recognize Chris Moornman, aka “moorman1” of Essex, as a former member of the Brunson 10 representing the now-defunct Doyles Room Poker site. More recently, Moorman cashed out $1,051,466 in this year’s World Series of Poker, including a second place win in the 6-handed $10K NL Hold’em event, worth $716,282, and a third place finish in the 6-handed $2.5K NL Hold’em event, worth $271,800. His online poker performance is even more impressive, with career winnings of around $7.5 million. Moorman is currently in the top 5 players on the 2011 World Series of Poker Player of the Year leader board.
At 19 years old, Nicky Evans, aka “Cod Meharly”, is early into his professional poker career, and already touts over $1.1 million in online winnings and another $175K plus in live play. Recent wins include three near $30K wins between December 2010 and May 2011, across two Poker Stars events and one Full Tilt Poker event, two of which were first place wins. On his online profile, Evans lists Moorman as one of the players he admires most. He cashed in two 2011 WSOP events, including a $2,343 cash in the main event.
Bet Online Poker’s Pop Points loyalty program offers real cash rewards. As with the rewards programs of other poker sites, at BetOnline you earn Pop Points each time you play in a raked hand in a cash game on the site or pay a fee to register for an online tournament. You can then convert these points into cash by using them to register for the $500 POP2Cash tournaments, a weekly event with a guaranteed monthly prize pool of $150,000.
On Friday, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) announced that it has granted Full Tilt Poker a renewal of its Secondary Client Provider Authorization (Secondary CPA). Over a month ago, Full Tilt Poker had its primary license suspended by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) and has not been open for business for anyone in the world. No one is entirely sure that this means for Full Tilt Poker but we do have to question what the KGC is thinking. Below is the statement released by the KGC.
Luvin Poker will be running Girls Night In, Hosted by 
The question is not 
Calvin Ayre announced this morning that the Bodog Brand is leaving the US. Most players took this to mean that Bodog is leaving the US but that’s not really the case. Over the past few years the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group’s (MMGG) has been licensing the Bodog name and will continue to operate the poker and sportsbook under a new name come January 1st, 2012. We realize this is a bit confusing but for you as a player the only change will be the name of the site. All deposits/withdrawls, support and software has been operated by MMGG. in other words Bodog has had nothing to do with the site other then have it’s name on it for the past 5 years.
