Gambling Gossip

LuckyAcePoker review

Alex — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:23:25 +0000

LuckyAcePoker.com is latest of the 888(pacific poker) Network sites to hit cyberspace. They offer a good variety of games from texas holdem to omaha and stud games, generous bonuses, creative promotions, and absolutely fantastic software. Along with their 100% matching bonus up to cool $400, they also give a Pokerbility odds calculator to anyone making their first deposit.

The games at LuckyAcePoker are filled with many beginner players and people who try out their casino and then end up also depositing to the poker side.

Guaranteed tournaments are also a big part of what Lucky Ace has to offer. Players may participate in the daily 5K and 10K tourneys and weekly 80K competitions. They also have a brand new weekly $100,000 guaranteed deep stack tournament every weekend. For these reasons and many more LuckyAcePoker.com is one of the best online poker rooms in cyberspace.

Big online poker games

Alex — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:25:26 +0000

For past couple of weeks we have been able to witness some of the biggest online poker games ever. These games have taken place at FullTiltPoker. The table stakes have varied from $500/$1000 pot limit omaha to
$2000/$4000 limit games and to $500/$1000nl. By far the biggest pots have been played in the $500/$1000 nl holdem games which has for past week or so been full(6 players) at least few times each day. People who have played in the game include known live poker pros such as Patrik Antonius, Phil Ivey and David Benyamine. There has been also bunch of new generation online poker heroes such as Tom”Durrr“Dwan, Brian “Stinger” Hastings, Ilari“Ziigmund“Sahamies and so on. There has been at least one billionaire playing – Guy Laliberte who is the owner of Cirque Du Soleil and maybe slightly surprising he has also scooped some of the biggest pot. Actually he just couple days ago won the biggest ever online poker pot played. The pot was over $600,000 and Guy scooped the pot with Q2suited which he managed to pair with one deuce from the board, winning $600,000 with just pair of deuces is quite incredible. We might see first ever $1million dollar pot very soon!

Gambling stocks in August 2008

Alex — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:55:31 +0000

This is our first monthly report about how some big gambling companies did in the stock exchange during the previous month.

Party Gaming PLC

Listed in the London stock exchange Party Gaming is certainly one of the worlds most valuable gambling brands with their most famous product being PartyPoker however Party has many other interesting brands such as PartyGammon, PartyBingo, PartyCasino and Gamebookers.

Party has tired hard to improve their falling poker player numbers. However they were still down last month from the last 6 months average. Summer is traditionally hard time for Gambling Companies so it’s interesting to see what happens in Fall and Winter.

Partys stock fell almost 7% in August.

888

888 Is company best know for its Pacific Poker brand. However the company has many other interesting products such as 888ladies which is a bingo brand. Pacific made an intresting choice when they decided to brand the bingo so clearly for females. The poker numbers at Pacific Poker were slightly below the 6 month average. But as with partypoker next few months might chance this.

There was interesting swings with the 888 stock with it starting month from around with it starting the month from around 150 going all the way up to 161 and then going down fast and after all going back to basically where it started the month.

Playtech

Playtech is bit different the first two companies as its mostly a software developer. Playtechs most famous product is the iPoker poker network software. Playtech had and interesting month in August As it made a deal with the Italian gambling company Snai and bought MIXTV.

Playtech finished the month up almost 4%

Cryptologic

In the entry below we went through some of the problems Cryptologic fights with its poker products. However the casino product Cryptologic has is extremely strong with nice its nice graphics and lucrative games. Cryptologic also deals with some major media partners. Thanks to these deals Cryptologic can use some extremely valuable brands in their casino games, one of the latest addition of theirs is a Spiderman themed slot-machine.

With all that said Cryptologic still had bad month and the stock fell 12%, however September is of to a good start with the stock being up over 3% today.

5 Reasons why the cryptologic poker network is struggling.

Alex — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:51:15 +0000

Cryptologic network has taken bunch of hard hits this year. The stock is down almost 50% in last 6 months, cryptologic also offers casino games and owns gambling sites themselves, but still having poker network is major part of their business. Recent news tell that 2 different cryptologic network sites have decided to change to new platform, PokerPlex to iPoker(Playtech) and LittlewoodsPoker to Pacific(888). We analyzed why the once great network has had such a tough times lately.

1) UIGEA. When the law regarding transfers to online gambling sites went through in USA cryptologic decided to pull out from that market. Now we can see that the most successful online poker sites are the ones that didn’t leave that market. And the ones that are doing well even after leaving the market are the ones who had good established player bases outside USA when they pulled out.

2) Betfair leaving the network. Betfair was one of the biggest cryptologic network “skins” and as a big sports book they brought in lot of bad and beginner poker players. Betfair wasn’t happy with the situation and first it bought the poker site called pokerchamps.com and the software platform the site used. The pokerchamps software was ahead of its time and maybe that’s why the site never really took off despite of being advertised by poker superstars Gus Hansen and Erik Sagström. Betfair paid around 10million euros for pokerchamps and while after buying the site they decided to leave the cryptologic network and set up their own site using the pokerchamps software. This lead to the immediate loss of the betfair players but also it made lot of poker professionals and grinders leave and these poker professionals and grinders are the most profitable people for poker network as they play the most.

3) FullTiltPoker. Its hard to think that FullTiltPoker is only couple years old site, they have in short time become the 2^nd biggest poker site on internet and have almost all the time 30k to 50k players online. This surely had affect on Cryptologics income.

4) Not getting new sites. One can only speculate why Cryptologic has not been able attract any new big players(existing sportsbooks and casinos) as their customers in a long time, however the fact is while iPoker and couple other poker networks have managed to make deals with new sites cryptologic has not been able to do it.

5) Worse promotions. Cryptologic made surprising change when they decided to make their “skin” worsen their promotions. Mostly the so called rakeback deals were cut back from 50% of net rake to maximum of 30% gross rake. The 50% net rake deal is in reality about 37.5% as a gross rake and cryptologic used sliding scale when they offered that deal so in reality many players were getting less back then they are now with 30% gross rakeback and monthly bonuses, however poker players do not think that way. They are extremely focused on the published numbers, good example of this is the FatBetPoker this site uses one of the worst poker softwares around ( old tain poker software), has terrible customer service and money transactions are pain in the ass. Still the site has managed to establish decent player base just by advertising 50% rakeback and big 1^st deposit bonus.

Information in this article has been gathered from several sources and while we try to make sure the information is true no guarantees can be made.