This August 2011, Party Poker is giving away sixteen trips to Germany for this year’s Oktoberfest celebration. Open only to Party Poker’s Palladium VIP members, this promotion is broken down into two separate points races, each awarding 7 of the 16 Oktoberfest prize packages, with a freeroll tournament at the end of the promo period to award the remaining 2 prize packages. In addition, more than 100 iPods, iPads and iPod Touches are up for grabs as well.
Opt-in to one or both races, running August 12-21 and August 22-31. Compete in both races and you’ll get more chances to win, in more ways than one. Players who excel in both races can win either an iPad 2 (16GB), if in the top 25 of each, and/or an iPod Touch (64GB) if in the top 75 of each.
The Oktoberfest prize packages, meanwhile, include luxury hotel accommodations, breakfasts, special dinners, exclusive poker tournament entries, and VIP tent access and VIP treatment throughout the festivities. Players finishing 8th-25th on either of the leaderboards win $250 in cash, while players finishing 26th-75th win $100 in cash. Then, the remaining players in the top 400 starting from 76 on down, will win an entry into a VIP Oktoberfest and Super Gadget Freeroll taking place September 4.
Just opt-in to the races and start playing at Party Poker’s real money tables as much as you can, earning as many PartyPoints as you can, and climbining higher and higher on that leader board toward a weekend in Munich you’ll never forget.
Starting August 1 and continuing through September 4, Party Poker is hosting satellite tournaments into the World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open taking place September 18 -22, 2011 in Atlantic City, NJ.
The PartyPoker WPT Borgata Poker Open prize package is valued at $7,000 and includes the $3,500 ticket into the main event, a 7-night stay at Atlantic City luxury accommodations, a voucher worth $100 to spend at the hotel’s restaurant or spa, and $2,000 cash to spend as you like.
As is standard for Party Poker’s World Poker Tour satellite series’ players can start out on the road to Atlantic City for free, with daily freeroll tournaments, each awarding the top 25 players seats in the sub qualifier speed rebuy event. That event, also daily, has a $1 buy-in and awards one seat in the qualifier for every $40 in the prize pool. There’s also a $5 + $1 daily sub qualifier speed event with no rebuy that awards 1 in every 8 players seats in the qualifier. The WPT Borgata Open qualifier is also daily event, with a $37.50 + $2.50 buy-in. On Sundays, this event is a Turbo event; the rest of the time a normal paced tournament. One out of every 10 players in the qualifier will make it to the $350 + $25 weekly satellite, held Sundays and awarding at least one WPT Borgata Poker Open prize package guaranteed.
Last year’s WPT Borgata Poker Open saw the prize pool top $2 million, with the winner taking $750,000. There’s no telling how high the prizes will go this year.
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.
All week long at Party Poker you can find guaranteed tournaments with prize pools at nosebleed heights. And if you’re successful at any of these tournaments, Party Poker will even reward you with placement on a tournament leaderboard running all month long.
For starters, Party Poker players can enjoy $30K Guaranteed Super Weekdays, Monday through Thursday at 3 pm ET with $99 buy-ins, no fee, and huge payouts. These tournaments also have satellite qualifiers aplenty leading into them, so you don’t have to pay the $99 buy-in to play. There are even points qualifiers you can enter with no cash whatsoever, only Party Poker Points.
The big guarantee of every week at Party Poker of course is its $200K Guaranteed Sunday event. This costs $215 to enter directly (again with no fee) and features, as promised in the title, a $200,000 guaranteed prize pool each time. As with the Party Poker $30K Guaranteed Super Weekdays, players can enter the $200K Guaranteed Sunday without paying the $215 buy-in by winning their way in through a series of satellite qualifiers running daily at the site. What’s more, there are actually a pair of $200K Guaranteed Sunday events: a multi-table event and a sit and go event, with separate qualifiers leading into each of them.
Players excelling in these or any tournaments at Party Poker will find themselves ranked on a monthly tournament leaderboard. There are separate MTT and Sit & Go leaderboards, each with weekly prizes up to $600 and monthly prizes that vary from month to month.
So far we’ve told you that 888 Poker and Cake Poker are sending players to the World Poker Tour WPT Grand Prix de Paris this year. But there’s still another site running WPT Paris satellite qualifiers and it’s Party Poker, with prize packages up for grabs worth $15,000 a piece.
The Party Poker WPT Grand Prix de Paris satellite series runs from June 20 to August 21. It includes freerolls tournaments that each give out 25 seats in a $3 speed rebuy sub qualifier that in turn sends one player to the satellite qualifier for every $75 in the prize pool. Alternately, there’s an $8 sub qualifier that’s not a speed event, which awards 1 of every 10 players a satellite qualifier seat. Similarly, the WPT Grand Prix de Paris Satellite Qualifiers, taking place twice daily except Sundays when they’re held only once and as a Turbo event, also send 1 in 10 finishers to the final event of the series, the WPT Grand Prix de Paris Satellite, in which 1 of every 20 finishers will get a $15,000 WPT Paris prize package, at least one package awarded at each satellite. These satellites take place on Sundays and have a $750 direct buy-in.
Each $15,000 Party Poker WPT Paris prize package includes, in addition to the $10,800 ticket into the main event, hotel accommodations while you’re in Paris (valued at $2,200), and $2,000 cash to spend as you see fit. The 2011 World Poker Tour Grand Prix de Paris takes place at the Aviation Club de France from September 5th to September 10th.
Party Poker is holding a special promotion with a $100,000 first prize and tens of thousands of dollars in other cash prizes and freeroll tournament tickets. The promotion, called World Domination, involves collecting playing cards representing different cities and countries in order to win associated prizes. Every card has a prize, and different collections of cards offer prizes as well. Cards are distributed randomly, awarded as players reach set targets in Party Points earnings.
It only takes 10,000 points to get a card, and only 5,000 to get your first card. The more points you earn, the more cards you get. City card prizes range from tickets into a special $1,000 Freeroll to $20 cash. Earn all four city cards from the same country and get anywhere from $75 to $1,500 cash. Earn all the countries on a particular continent and get from $5,000 to $20,000 cash. And get all 5 continents – Europe, Asia, Oceania and North and South America – and you win World Domination and receive the $100,000 first prize.
World Domination Freerolls will take place September 4 – 6, with 9 freerolls, each offering a prize pool ranging from $1K to $10K. Earn more than one entry into any given World Domination Freeroll and Party Poker will give you 5 Party Points instead, helping you climb higher toward that next target prize.
There are 72 countries in all in the Party Poker World Domination promotion. The contest ends either when someone claims World Domination or August 31, whichever one happens first.
In what many are saying is a historic first, a poker site has abolished its multi-table tournament fees. That site is Party Poker and this change – what they’re calling Rake Free Summer – is valid for the remainder of the summer.
Here’s how it will work. During the Party Poker Rake Free Summer, the fees for all MTTs will be added to the tournament’s normal buy-in. So a $100 + $10 event will become a $110 event. While this may seem on the surface not to be a big savings at all, it actually boosts the pot that tournament players will be vying for. Sticking with the above example, instead of paying $100 into the prize pool and $10 into Party Poker’s pocket, you would pay the full $110 into the prize pool, meaning all that money goes right back to the players – to you, if you play your cards right.
Also running this July, 2011 at Party Poker is a $100K freeroll taking place August 7. To earn your ticket, just make a reload deposit using the bonus code 200JULY. That code will also give you a 100% reload bonus on that deposit, up to a maximum bonus of $200.
Don’t forget the Summer Million coming up at Party Poker fast. All this month Party Poker will be running daily Summer Million freeroll qualifiers with $1,000 guaranteed prize pools to boot. And speaking of qualifiers, during the Party Poker Rake Free Summer promotion, any qualifier tournaments that ordinarily have a rake or fee will also no longer have it for the duration of the summer.
Party Poker is now holding satellite tournaments into the World Poker Tour main event happening in the Slovenian city of Portoroz, known for its bustling nightlife and relaxing beachside resorts. The WPT Slovenia main event takes place July 17th through 23rd, 2011 at the Grand Casino Portoroz and costs €3000 + €300 to buy-in.
Satellites and qualifiers into this event run from June 13th through July 3rd, 2011. You can win seats in the WPT Slovenia main event for as little an investment as nothing at all, with freeroll qualifiers running daily, each leading into the $1 WPT Slovenia Sub Qualifier Speed Rebuy events. There are also regular Speed Sub Qualifiers for $6 buy-ins. These lead to the daily Satellite Qualifiers with direct buy-ins of their own of $42 which in turn lead to the actual WPT Slovenia Satellite, held every Sunday for a $390 buy-in, where at least one seat in the Portoroz main event will be awarded.
Each Party Poker prize package for the WPT Slovenia main event is worth $7,700 and includes hotel stay and some expense money on top of the buy-in into the event.
This marks Season 10 of the World Poker Tour, with Party Poker regularly running satellites and qualifiers into many of the series’ main events. Coming up after the WPT Slovenia is the Legends of Poker at the The Bicycle Casino in Las Vegas, held August 25th through 30th, 2011, followed by the WPT Grand Prix de Paris and its High Rollers counterpart, both at the Aviation Club de France, Septemer 5th through 11th, 2011.
How would you like to attend the German Grand Prix at Nürburgring this year? If that sonds like your idea of a good time, then Party Poker wants to send you there, if you’re one of the winners of its VIP Race to Nürburgring.
Running from June 10 to 26, 2011, the Party Poker VIP Race to Nürburgring is a simple points race, with progress tracked on a leader board. Earn points as you normally do, by playing at PartyPoker’s cash game and tournament tables. The top 10 finishers on the leader board at the end of the promotional period will win a Nürburgring German Grand Prix VIP package.
Each prize package includes a two night stay at a five-star hotel, tickets for the Saturday qualifying race and Sunday race, access to a special meet and greet event with Marc Surer, Sky motor racing pro, entry into a special Saturday night poker tournament at the hotel, transportation to and from the hotel and $850 in spending cash. Party Poker is also awarding an additional $25,000 in bonus prizes.
The top 150 finishers will win prizes. The top 8 will get a Nürburgring prize package. The remaining players in the top 150 will win either cash or PartyPoker points and entry into a special tournament where two more Nürburgring prize packages will be awarded. For example, places 9 through 12 will win $1,500 cash and a tournament entry, while places 100 to 150 will win 750 store points and a tournament entry.
Don’t forget to opt in for the promotion before you start playing so you can be sure your points will count towards leaderboard position.
Throughout the entire month of June, 2011, Party Poker will be holding The Big Draw, a raffle-style promotion in which players can win prizes including iPads, television, trips to the Caribbean or Las Vegas…even a Porsche 911 Carrera.
All you have to do to earn your first raffle ticket is play in at least one raked hand at any Party Poker ring game table in June. From there, PartyPoker will give you an additional ticket for each and every player point you earn at the site. And you don’t have to give up the points to claim the tickets either. The raffle tickets are just a bonus on top of the PartyPoker points added to your regular, ongoing tally.
Party Poker will hold drawings every day in June and as long as you earned at least one ticket on that day, you qualify for the drawing. What’s more, all tickets that haven’t yet been drawn are reused in each and every drawing. So if you earn a ticket on June 15th, for example, you’ll be entered in that day’s drawing once with that ticket and once for each ticket you’re still holding from all the previous days of June.
In all, Party Poker is giving away $500,000 in prizes, including weekly mega draws held every Sunday for the biggest of the prizes on the slate: on June 5 the prize will be a VIP Vegas trip for two; on June 12 the prize will be a Caribbean cruise for two; on June 19 the prize will be a Harley Davidson Fatboy Motorcycle and on June 26 the prize will be a Porsche 911 Carrera.
The question is not 
