Late December rulings marked a paramount change in the status of land-based and online poker in the state of Nevada. Officials legalized online Poker in the state of Nevada after a vote of 4 to 0 at the Nevada Gaming Control Board. This means that patrons will be legally able to play poker online in Nevada. Officials will also regulate online poker for the players’ protection. The unanimous vote was a huge step for Nevada gaming institutions and patrons. The only drawback to this situation is the lack of establishments who have gained proper licensing to practice. Currently there are no licensed poker rooms.

In order to provide gaming opportunity to the customers, all Nevada poker rooms have to acquire the appropriate licensing. Officials expect that the first online poker rooms will open on or about February 1, 2012. Initially, these poker rooms will only be able to operate in the state of Nevada. Eventually, when the government regulates online poker, the licensed rooms will have the opportunity to make gaming available online to people in other states. Hopefully the federal government will approve such legalities so that gaming institutions can capitalize off the many people in the world who would like to enjoy the online experience.

No official reports have been released on how many establishments will gain licensing for online operations. Six organizations have applied for licenses to operate in Nevada so far. Such companies include 888 Holdings, South Point Poker, Shuffle Master, Bally Technologies, International Game Technology, and Cantor Gaming. The only company that applied to operate in an online atmosphere was 888 Holdings. If that company can obtain licensing to operate online, they will have the ability to earn just as much as the other companies if not more. They may actually be able to get a financial gain on other online gaming companies.

Customers must fit a certain criteria in order to play in Nevada Poker rooms. They must provide identification to verify they are 21 years of age or older. Online Poker will follow suit and should be available for patrons some time in 2012. Once online Poker is available and other states can see its success, more states will most likely take steps to also have it regulated and legalized. Eventually, customers from all over the country will have access to gaming opportunities. Soon organizations will make online Poker gaming available at a national level.

December 21st, 2011 – One of the most prominent poker companies where American poker players would go to, Bodog, decided to close up shop to U.S. Players and focus only on players from other countries. This comes after more than 10 years as the first name in USA gaming.

Why did this happen? In July of 2011, Bodog acquired a license to do business in the United Kingdom. Because of this, they focused their market to UK and Overseas players and decided to comply with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 and ceased operations to US players by failing to renew its contract with a company called the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, who has held the right to use the name Bodog in the United States.

But the good news is that the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group decided not to alienate the United States Gaming Market. Realizing there was still a market for American poker players, they needed a new site name, and found it with a site called Bovada.lv, which was opened this week. Bovada was probably chosen because of its similarity to the name Bodog, as well as the extension lv, which technically is the country code from the country of Latvia, but most Americans might think of a correlation with the city of Las Vegas.
In addition, the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group wanted to ensure that Americans who had money invested in the Bodog web site to have as easy of a time being able to transfer all the money over to the new Bovada web site, and they made a public announcement that gamers from the United States of America would have no problem during the adjustment to the new site.

The Bovada site is licensed by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, located in Canada, and they have assured that all American players who had account balances with Bodog had no trouble retaining their account balances and information during the transition to the new Bovada site, and everything should run as smoothly as it did with the former Bodog site that American players had been so accustomed to over the past decade.

October 23rd, 2011 – There is still time to take advantage of the fabulous online poker room promotion offered by Americas Cardroom. The buy-in into this tournament is $100+9 or satellites start from as low as $4.40 to join. The tourney will be held on October 24th, at 8pm EST and it includes the prizes for top 3 players, no matter if you finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, you will receive a package worth $3,500 which will include a 5 night stay, the main even buy-in, unlimited alcohol and food, you will be treated like a rock star.

Take advantage of this monthly promotion by the most popular online poker room the Americas Cardroom and check out more of theirs weekly or daily promotions and bonuses.

One of the most popular online poker room, Carbon Poker, is proud to present to all poker players that they will be sponsoring a huge $15,000 Carbon Poker League. The CP league is continuous tournament series, where players collect points to be qualified for the added $10,200. The big final, which will be the final showdown, will take place on January 8th at 1pm, EST. The poker league starts October 11th running until the Big Final tournament on Jan. 8th.

Carbon Poker will also contribute a weekly cash buy-in to tournaments every Tuesday and Friday at 1pm EST. The better you finish in the tournament the more points you will receive towards the main event. CP will also offer three freerolls for 50 Carbon Poker VIP points as the entry fee, playing for the league points and free added $1,000 prize. The freerolls will take place on Nov 3rd, Dec 1st and Dec 29th.

Top 30 players who will finish in the Carbon Poker League will qualify for the Big Final event on Jan. 8th, to where 15 of those 30 players are automatically quaranteed $100, to where the first place will take the main prize pool of $2,250.

As per the past personal opinions from Nobert Teufelberger and Bwin co-Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Manfred Bodner are concerned they are regretting that pulling out of the US market in the year 2006 was the biggest and costliest mistakes they made. This comes in the purview of the US online gambling market being regulated in the coming months.

This realization of mistake has brought mostly due to the opening up of the gambling market in the United States and web sites such as Full Tilt and PokerStars being frozen out of the online gambling industry. There is no doubt that these two sites are still facing indictment in the US.

According to Teufelberger, the sites – Full Tilt and PokerStars were operating illegally in the United States. However, post-UIGEA, both Bwin and Party Gaming refused to accept their previous comments. A recent merger of both these giants has increased the anticipation about who was right.

If Full Tilt and PokerStars were still operating in the market under a legal perspective, they would have been lost billions from their revenue. PartyPoker was one of the most popular gambling sites in the US at that time and it was only after the exit of the PartyPoker, that PokerStars was able to taste success. Even though no player from the US is allowed, the site is a huge success and has a huge following with every 100 and 200 000 joining daily.

According to Teufelberger, there are only two companies in the entire poker world successful in poker than them and they are stronger only because they are operating in the US. However, this view is still a cause of disagreement as Full Tilt is not doing well in the US and PokeStars is gaining huge popularity in Europe.

September 5th, 2011 – Jamie Gold, the 2006 World Series of Poker champion has launched a free online poker room known as FreeGoldPoker.com. The main essence of this poker is it is absolutely free and doesn’t require any kind of fee as it earns its profits through heavy advertising and sponsorship. Being a part of the massive multi-player online gaming, Zen Entertainment Network tournament, the players can win free points for signing in every day, which they can use to buy in poker tournaments.

According to a press release, Jamie Gold was very happy on the launch and expressed his excitement as he said that it was the most amazing opportunity that came to him to create fun, easily accessible as well as unique experience for all the poker players in the US. After Black Friday and all the negativity surrounding the online poker community, I wanted to do something for the poker community and hence I came up with a game that they love legally as well as increase the awareness of some of the fantastic brands, he added.

Matthew Spurr, CEO of the PokerFacePR and developer of Jamie Gold, said that they are soon going to launch contests for things such as logo design and other fan experiences on the JamieGold.com.

This site will go hand in hand with the Jamie’s site on ZEN. This wondrous web site has really given an opportunity to Gold to connect with the online poker community in the way he had always wanted to be.

The 2011 World Series of Poker even after suffering the April 15th set back has come back strongly and is tasting success. Even after facing a lot of crackdown from the government, online poker has gained a lot of popularity from people all across the world. Many poker rooms surfaced online offering players from USA many incentives and bonuses to sign up. This was especially seen in the Las Vegas when a large number of people gathered to make the most out of their poker skills. As many as 75,000 people participated and played in the 58 WSOP bracelet events making a prize pool of a whopping $187,109,850.

This success of the WSOP shows how popular poker is in this era and how the globalization of poker with the help of Internet has made several people interested in playing poker. Even after this tremendous craze for poker, the United States is yet to make the most out of this booming industry of poker. This is mainly evident from the fact that the US is still hesitant to provide licenses to companies in US so that they can provide real money poker. This is nothing but a forced suppression of personal freedom of the US citizens. Thus, it is time to press for laws such as H.R. 2366 and H.R. 1174. These are nothing but legislation that support online poker.

The success and popularity of poker is evident mostly because out of the 6,800 main event entries began in the first place. This alone garnered $8.71 and with 75,672 entries on Sunday made the WSOP the biggest ever tournament. The main motive of these entries was not only to play poker but it was a call to the government to legalize online poker.

This has been a tremendous turnout from the 2,576 main event entries in 2004. The continued increasing support to legalize online poker in Washington will most probably come to fruition this year. This has also made a lot of casino executives a lot more optimistic than they have been ever before.

Legalizing online poker will definitely ensure more explosive growth in the arena of poker and people will not have to wait for too long to see the main event entries touching 10,000 and the sky will only be the limit for these entries.

Poker tournaments are not just money making machines; they are in fact something more than these. People who love to play poker are also ready to travel miles to take part in the World Series of Poker and are also willing to spend a lot of money. There is no doubt that it is going to be difficult to maintain this record.

This could have already taken place earlier especially if the politicians would have not got stuck in the bad deal of 2006, when the poker world was knocked for a loop by former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s through his successful efforts to nibble the tremendous growth of Internet gambling with laws that prohibited U.S. financial institutions from handling transactions.

Republican Representative Joe Barton’s mission to implement the online poker legislation has finally been accomplished when he introduced the Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection and Strengthening of UIGEA Act. The bill, since the past few weeks was making news and the Congress has now finally got the new online poker law.

As per Joe Barton, the Act if passed by the Congress will make online poker legal and will allow people of America to play online poker within the purview of the law. He added that, poker is not a game of chance but requires a lot of skill from the players. He also stated that players employ a lot of strategies to be successful in poker and he sees no reason that it should be banned in the United States.

The bill when adopted will also require the poker operators to work towards protecting the players. Poker operators will have to recognize the problems of the players and should equip them with all the necessary information that would help them. The operators will also have to install some systems that would help the players to restrict their losses. The poker operators will also need to keep a watch on underage players.

The bill in its current form has garnered a lot of support from the same clique of politicians who had earlier supported the Barney Frank’s and Jim McDermott’s online gambling bills. However, the bill is not devoid of criticism as some politicians feel that the bill has excluded some of the vital issues such as protecting players from fraud and other forms of gambling. Considering this, there are chances that the bill will need to be amended.

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