The World Poker Exchange's Intercollegiate Poker Championship has come to a close and with it, a champion is crowned. University of Kentucky freshman Nate Belt took the title of "Best College Player in the Country" after beating the other four regional finalists at the competition's final leg in Cancun, Mexico.

As winner of the championship, Belt nabs the grand prize, which includes $10,000 in scholarship money, as well as paid entry to the $10,000 buy-in London Open. The London Open will give Belt the chance to compete towards the guaranteed $2 million prize pool.

Over 1,000 students across the U.S. played their hand at World Poker Exchange's combination online/offline tournament. Runners up were Ryan Demeter of Vanderbilt University, who came in second and third place winner Devin Hanneman of the University of Utah.


Source: OPN Staff

LONDON (Reuters) - Online casino 888.com is looking at joining the ranks of firms benefiting from a boom in Internet poker by listing this year with a valuation of about $1.6 billion (830 million pounds), the company's chief executive told Reuters.

Cassava Enterprises, the owner of 888.com and one of the world's biggest Internet gambling groups, has hired Credit Suisse First Boston to prepare the flotation, expected in the second half of this year.

"We have appointed CSFB to look at a whole range of options for us, one of which obviously is an IPO," John Anderson, chief executive of 888.com told Reuters on Wednesday.

"If that option was chosen it would be London. The logic for London I think is that the business is much more institutionally accepted in the UK than anywhere else and therefore the value should be higher," he added.

London is fast becoming the de facto listing centre for Internet gambling companies, partly because online gaming is strictly regulated in the United States but welcomed in Britain, even though most players are in the States.

Anderson said he was not surprised by the level of institutional investor, shareholder and client interest in online gambling businesses.

"This business is a very interesting one. Compared to normal businesses, I have no distribution costs, no production costs, no logistical problems, no storage costs, no stock costs. I get my cash up front. It is a pure cash business," he said.

"It is something people enjoy doing and will continue to do so. The growth in the poker has been absolutely stunning, it's a cool thing to do," Anderson added.

Rapid industry expansion, helped by better broadband access and the convenience of playing at home, has fuelled revenue growth at the companies hosting the sites.

"These are attractive growth stories. The online poker market is probably growing at over 100 percent a year," said Matthew Gerard, analyst at Investec Securities.

In January, the world's biggest online poker company, PartyGaming, said it was considering a listing that would value it at over 3 billion pounds, which would make it one of London's largest share listings for over three years.

The online gambling market is difficult to estimate, but is set to grow to over $10 billion a year.

A recent report by Edison Investment Research and Durlacher estimated online gambling revenue -- effectively the amount lost by gamblers -- exceeded $8 billion in 2004, up 37 percent from a year earlier.

But analysts estimate this represents under 3 percent of the world gambling market, and prospects were bright.

"Online gambling appeals to a wider audience than traditional gambling -- in particular to younger, more affluent computer literate customers and to women," the Edison report said. "Playing at home is not just convenient, it can also be much less intimidating than visiting a casino or a betting shop."

Poker is driving the growth. A report this month from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said sports betting represents 45 percent of total online gambling spending with other gaming representing 32 percent, but both could be overtaken by poker by 2008 or earlier.

Operators are also looking for the next big growth areas, however, with bingo and skill games and gambling on mobile phones and interactive television seen driving growth.

Companies exposed to the industry have boomed. Shares in Sportingbet have more than trebled in the last year to value the owner of the Paradise Poker site at 1 billion pounds.

Gaming VC has almost doubled in value since listing in December to give it a price tag of over 250 million pounds, while ukbetting has been rewarded for launching a new poker site.

Other beneficiaries have included CryptoLogic, a software developer for internet gaming whose shares have almost doubled in the last year, and online payment processing company, NETeller, whose market value has more than trebled to over 800 million pounds since listing in London last April.

Over the past few weeks, a group of bloggers across the globe has launched a Googlebomb for the search term "online poker." What this means is that the involved parties are trying to inundate blog sites with links in order to manipulate the Google hierarchy. The group is linking between blogs and the Wikipedia Online Poker page, in order to push it closer to the top ranking, and in the mean time, trying to push online poker rooms further down the ranks.

The group's stated goal is to protest comment spam, with online poker constituting one of the more highly spammed phrases. The idea is to push an informational page, such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia, up Google's ladder and to push commercial online poker sites down. This effort, however, will ultimately create problems for bloggers as well as for Google. Moreover, the spam war is unlikely to end in honor of this Googlebomb, but rather the stakes will just continue to rise, with spammers increasing their activities in order to combat Wikipedia's growing rank.

Source: OPN Staff

Howard Lederer, a well known player on the professional poker circuit, is getting ready for his second annual No Limit Texas Hold'em Reality Camp, which will kick-off on March 31st. The four-day Texas Hold'em workshop promises to help participants beef up their Texas Hold'em skills, giving them first hand experience in an exclusive reality camp tournament, featuring a total prize pool of $50,000. The tournament's top prize is a seat at the 2005 World Series of Poker, and covers the $10,000 buy-in.

Howard Lederer isn't the only poker celebrity to take part in the workshop; an impressive lineup of poker pros will also making appearances. Participants will get the chance to meet poker professionals, including Chris Ferguson, Erik Seidel, Andy Bloch, Layne Flack, Robert Williamson, Paul Phillips, Phil Gordon as well as Lederer's own sister, Annie Duke.

The camp will take place at Las Vegas' MGM Grand Casino, and the $3,495 registration fee covers lodging, all of the poker events, as well as entrance to a Penn and Teller show.

Source: OPN Staff

ESPN's poker drama, "Tilt," debuted in January amidst much controversy and speculation. The show portrays the world of professional poker as a hard-boiled underworld fraught with crime and conspiracy. Already from the beginning, it was clear that the racy new show would make waves, but just how high those waves would climb remained to be seen.

ESPN's track record with original dramas leaves what to be desired. The network's first effort, "Playmakers," did to the world of pro football what it has done to pro poker in "Tilt." After a good deal of griping on the part of NFL players and officials, the show got axed after its first season. The network figured that "Playmakers' " promising ratings weren't reason enough to risk jeopardizing its relationship with the NFL.

Although "Tilt" was expected to generate controversy, many believed the chances that it would suffer a fate similar to that of "Playmakers" was unlikely, since the world of poker was assumed to be less organized and united than that of professional football. Well, they may be wrong. Poker Updates, a monthly online streaming television program covering events and issues current to the world of poker, broadcast a segment which showed professional poker players' take on the show as less than favorable. Nine-time champion of the World Series of Poker, Doyle Brunson was quoted as calling the show a "disgrace." Will professional poker players merely suffer in silence, or will they take action against ESPN? Guess we'll just have to stay tuned.

Source: OPN Staff

By Brandon Bailey
Mercury News