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.
The folks who brought us the World Series of Poker, 441 Productions and David Neal, have created a brand new poker league: the Epic Poker League. And broadcasters of EPL events include none other than CBS Sports.
The Velocity Network, the new HD cable “male upscale lifestyle” network of Discovery Communications, will also be airing footage of Epic Poker League tournament action. Between the two broadcasters, over 20 hours of EPL coverage will be presented to fans at home: 13 hours from Velocity and 7 hours from CBS Sports. Broadcasts on the latter station will be hosted by Emmy Award-winner Pat O’Brien and the off-screen announcer at the National Heads-Up Poker Championship and NBC television’s Poker After Dark, Ali Nejad.
The first EPL event takes place August 9 – 12 at the Las Vegas Palms Casino. This inaugural season of the tour will consist of four main events, all of which culminate in 2012 in a $1 million guaranteed freeroll final at which only 27 players will remain.
Comprising the Epic Poker League will be 218 of poker’s biggest names, including Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, Phil Hellmuth, Erik Seidel, Barry Greenstein and Phil Ivey.
The parent company of the tour, Federated Sports & Gaming (FS+G), which is headed up by chief executive Jeffrey Pollack, paid CBS Sports to buy time to broadcast the Epic Poker League, not unlike an infomerical producer buys time to air their material, while the Velocity Network agreed to air footage as part of a promotional tie-in deal in.
Poker Stars is holding satellite tournaments awarding seats in the Casino Pride Poker Festival taking place Septembe 2 – 4, 2011 in Goa, India. With a guaranteed prize pool of INR1,000,000, the Casino Pride Poker Event takes place in the SOL Poker Room of the docked cruise ship, Casino Pride.
Poker Stars online satellites into the Casino Pride Poker Event include freeroll tournaments taking place at 9:30 am and 11:30 am ET daily, with a freeroll final happening August 22. Feeder satellites with buy-ins starting at just $0.55 or 10 Frequent Player Points (FPP) leads to one of three different satellites, each offering a slightly different prize package for the winners.
The top prize packages for the PokerStars Casino Pride Poker Event are valued at $1,726 and include the buy-in of INR25,000 into the main event, a three-night stay plus breakfasts at the Taj Vivante, a 5-star hotel located in Panjim, Goa, transfers to and from the airport and $750 cash to apply toward travel expenses. The satellites for these packages cost $215 and take place every Sunday through August 21.
Alternatively, players can win value-added seats, which include the INR25,000 main event buy-in and stay in a local 4-star hotel. The satellites for these packages cost $109 to buy-in directly and are happening every Tuesday and Thursday until August 23. Satellites running every Saturday and Sunday until August 21 with $66 direct buy-ins are also taking place for just the INR25,000 main event buy-in alone.
The action at the Casino Pride Poker Event is made up of three tournaments with cash games taking place throughout.
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.
Months after Black Friday many poker players in the US are still trying to figure out where and how to play online. While many of the high stakes players have moved outside the US, not everyone can just pick up and leave. Therefore we’ve compiled a list of online poker sites still operating in the US.
At the top of the list is Bodog Poker, which is a well-established name in the US. Bodog recently announced that they will be changing the name of their US facing operations but have no fear the only change will be in the name. They offer players a 110% bonus up to $1100 and run a weekly 100k tournament. Players are stating that they are receiving withdrawal checks in under a week.
Another well-established sports booking site has set its sight’s on the US poker market and that is BetOnline. They’ve been around for over 10 years and have a great reputation. Their poker software is proprietary and they are aggressively marketing to players by offering a 25% up to Unlimited bonus.
Luvin Poker on the Everleaf network is also offering a massive bonus of 200% up to $1000 and the play is super soft. While they don’t boast the number of players that the bigger sites do, they are a great site for the lower stake games. They are also 100% mac compatible.
The Merge Poker network sites are do to reopen to new US players this month. There are two online poker sites on the Merge network that we highly recommend and those are Lock Poker, which has been signing many of today’s top young poker pros, and Carbon Poker, which is the flagship site of the Merge network. Both offer generous bonuses but players claim that cashouts from Lock Poker are slightly quicker then those from Carbon Poker.
Make sure to visit Holdem Poker Chat regularly for updates on the above poker sites as well as all poker news. We’ll continue to update and monitor all US Poker Sites daily so all you have to do is play and win.
With the April 15th indictment of the big online poker rooms like Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, and Absolute Poker, there was a major concern that the 2011 World Series of Poker would take a dip in terms of it’s entrants, as well as it’s fans watching. This turned out to not be the case at all, on either fronts.
The 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event drew in a crowd of 6,865 players, and had an incredible number of fans watching the live action daily, all the way down to the November Nine. There were 10 programs for the Main Event that aired on ESPN2, and had around 415,000 people watching each episode. To top that off though, the primetime coverage of the event drew in 646,000 viewers, and there was also the live action streamed on ESPN3 online daily as well.
According to the senior director of programming and acquisitions of ESPN, Doug White, the show also did incredibly well in the early morning hours of 1am to 5am, boosting numbers around 136% overall. Another great addition to the show was the professional poker player guest commentators, such as Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, Olivier Busquet, and Johnny Chan. One of these players was constantly there to give analysis, predictions, and opinions on how hands were played, and how they would have played them.
The Main Event was even discussed on the biggest show on ESPN, Sports Center. It’s incredibly impressive that after all that the United States has been through in terms of the ups and downs of online poker, that they were able to bring in not only the large number of players; but also the large number of fans as well. While the future of online poker is still up in the air, one thing that seems to not be is the big time events like the World Series of Poker. The 2011 World Series even broke records for largest total prize pool, as well as most entrants across all of the events.
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.
The latest rumors about embattled Full Tilt Poker and their fall from grace had unknown European investors set to buy up the beleaguered franchise. Now ERG Magazine is reporting that those investors are only interested in certain UK and Ireland based parts of the company. The word is that they want nothing to do with anything facing the United States.
Many industry watchers think that such a deal has very little chance of being completed in time for the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) hearing slated to take place in London on Thursday July 28, 2011. Most believe that Full Tilt Poker will not be allowed to restart operations with their AGCC License without some sort of financial deal in place by that time.
Whether or not a deal for just some of the assets does take place, will non-US players return to the brand if they do not see US player balances being paid?
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.
Months after Black Friday many poker players in the US are still trying to figure out where and how to play online. While many of the high stakes players have moved outside the US, not everyone can just pick up and leave. Therefore we’ve compiled a list of online poker sites still operating in the US.
With the April 15th indictment of the big online poker rooms like Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, and Absolute Poker, there was a major concern that the 2011 World Series of Poker would take a dip in terms of it’s entrants, as well as it’s fans watching. This turned out to not be the case at all, on either fronts.
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.
The latest rumors about embattled Full Tilt Poker and their fall from grace had unknown European investors set to buy up the beleaguered franchise. Now