Bovada Turns Ignition

So it sounds like Bovada -- the U.S.-serving online poker site (and casino and racebook and sportsbook) -- is going to shut down at the end of September.

The site has been sold to Ignition Casino, and players have been invited to open accounts over there and have their funds transferred over. There’s a casino there, too, to go with the poker room, but no racebook or sportsbook I believe. An email to players explains how Ignition’s poker room “uses the same platform as Bovada,” and so includes all the same games and tournaments.

In fact, the site looks very much like a “skin” or copy of Bovada in every respect. In other words, the move is a bit like the one the site pulled off back in December 2011 when the U.S.-part of Bodog split off and was rebranded as Bovada.

I played on Bodog back in the day, and still have an account over on Bovada although I never played any real money games there. After messing around with some small bankrolls won via freerolls on Merge sites during the year or two following Black Friday, I haven’t bothered trying to play on any of these “rogue” sites at all. Too many stories of various difficulties getting funds onto such sites and making withdrawals have been enough to discourage me -- never mind the much worse tales of scams and loss of funds (via various causes) making playing on those sites even less enticing.

Of course a lot of players have stuck with Bovada in particular over the last few years, with its traffic essentially rivaling that of the 888poker, the world’s second-most frequented online poker site behind PokerStars (that is, well behind Stars which is like 8-10 times as busy as either).

That’s including the Bodog.eu portion of the player pool, too, which I’m not sure will be the case with Ignition. That is to say, Ignition may only have U.S. players competing against each other, or at least that’s what an Ignition customer service rep told PokerNews.

Americas Cardroom (on the Winning network), another U.S.-facing site, also remains popular among a decent number of American players, despite all sorts of bugginess with its software and other issues (besides that missing apostrophe in its name).

It remains kind of curious how this Bodog-Bovada-Ignition shell game gets to continue onward while managing to escape the punishments -- and, it seems, the miscalculations that helped lead to those punishments -- that knocked their larger rivals out of the U.S. five-plus years back. Seems like this might be a step away from the U.S. online poker game (of sorts) for Bodog owner Calvin Ayre who recently has been mentioned in some of these investigative reports regarding Bitcoin (with which he seems heavily involved).

The rogue sites remain interesting on some level, I suppose, if only as a dim echo of other examples of shady, legally-dubious poker games that have constantly been part of the history of the game in the U.S. But for me the interest is essentially academic, as I’m content to watch from the virtual rail.

Image: Ignition Casino.

On the Props

Was spending part of today considering all of these Super Bowl prop bets. I was put in the mood to do so after having posted a discussion with Rich Ryan over on PokerNews the focus of which was Super Bowl betting -- this week’s “Inside Gaming” column.

As mentioned there, last year the Nevada sports books took in more wagers than ever before, besting the previous year’s record by a lot. They also profited considerably thanks in part to heavy action on favorite Denver and Seattle ending up crushing, earning more percentage-wise in nearly a decade.

Super Bowl prop bets are significant for the sports books, with many of them longshots and thus great opportunities for the books to win. The lines can be a bit skewy on them, too, which perhaps opens up some opportunities for savvy bettors. But on the whole they’re hard to read (at least for an amateur like me).

Among the items I read today was USA Today’s “19 craziest prop bets for Super Bowl XLIX.” Like a lot of folks this week, they look to Bovada -- the site we online poker players know better as the-one-that-used-to-be-Bodog -- as their source of props. Bovada has more than 500 prop bets listed, with practically every detail regarding what might happen in Arizona on Sunday covered.

These “19 craziest” ones include many with nothing to do with the actual game itself. Those include bets on Katy Perry’s wardrobe during her halftime performance as well as how many times she will be mentioned during the first half, whether or not Idina Menzel will forget a word of the national anthem, Bill Belichick’s hoodie color and type, which team owner (Robert Kraft or Paul Allen) will be shown more often during the game, the number of times Gisele Bundchen (Tom Brady’s wife) will be shown, the number of times deflated balls will be mentioned, the number of viewers, who the Super Bowl MVP will first mention after the game, whether Marshawn Lynch will grab his crotch after scoring a TD, and whether Bill Belichick will smile. Of these I most like the one about whether or not Al Michaels will make any gambling references during the telecast (i.e., to the point spread, over/under, game odds, prop bets).

Even the game-related ones have to do with extracurriculars, like the parlay pairing whether or not Punxsatawney Phil sees his showdow and the game’s outcome, or the one comparing the length of the Silva-Diaz UFC fight and LeGarrette Blount’s rushing attempts. In fact among these “crazy” bets are only four football-only ones -- whether or not Tom Brady will throw a TD or interception first, whether or not one of the kickers will win MVP, which Seattle player will catch their first pass, and how many field goals Seattle will make.

Every one of these feels like a sucker bet, as do many of the other props even if one might legitimately have an edge betting a particular side of them. Heck even the game itself -- which Rich tells me the Football Outsiders guys are describing as historically remarkable in terms of how mathematically even the two teams are talent-wise -- feels especially hard to predict.

Who do you think will win on Sunday? Other than the sports books, that is.

The Bravado of Bovada

This morning Bodog -- the site where even Americans can still play online poker for real money as well as bet on sports, horse racing, and play other casino games -- shifted its American customers over to a new site awkwardly called “Bovada.”

The new site appears to feature all of the same software and design as the Bodog site, with only the URL and name differing. According to the site’s welcome page, the new name was chosen deliberately to begin with the same letters as Bodog so as to help users “find us in your browser for the next few weeks.”

The site has an odd “.lv” extension (a Latvian domain), which it explains is meant to “remind our players of Las Vegas, the number one gambling destination in the U.S.” And, of course, the made-up word “Bovada” sounds a little like Nevada as well, thus perhaps furthering the association.

While the rest of the world continues to play and gamble on Bodog, then, we Americans are now being invited to visit Bovada, a kind of mythical destination where I suppose we are to believe U.S. laws cannot reach.

Way back when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was first signed into law and the possible fate of U.S.-facing online poker sites was first being discussed, nearly everyone held up Bodog as the least likely to survive in the U.S. going forward. Remember? The fact that Bodog offered other gambling games, especially sports betting, alongside poker, caused most in the poker world to believe the site couldn’t possibly be long for the U.S. post-UIGEA.

Some of us also recall Calvin Ayre (who founded Bodog back in 2004) brazenly appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine and being featured in a story whose title -- “Catch Me If You Can” -- paraphrased the entrepreneur’s attitude toward the U.S. Department of Justice. That, too, made it look like Ayre was just asking for trouble, which in a few short months would potentially arrive in the form of the UIGEA.

Lots of talk at the time by poker people over whether or not our favorite game was in fact covered under the UIGEA’s original definition of a “bet or wager” as “the staking or risking by any person of something of value upon the outcome of a contest of others, a sporting event, or a game subject to chance.” However one came down on that one -- then or now -- all tended to agree that what Bodog was doing by offering sports betting along with other games pretty obviously subject to chance must make them a more obvious target.

But somehow they perservered. On Black Friday, when we first scanned the list of sites targeted -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and UltimateBet -- many were surprised Bodog had escaped being included in that list.

Sorta seems like ever since I first opened an account on Bodog way back in late 2006 they’ve been on the move.

It was right about the time I first started playing on Bodog that the site announced it was planning to scale back its advertising in the U.S. This was back during that brief period when 2006 WSOP Main Event champion Jamie Gold was representing Bodog, a relationship fated to last only a short time.

I wrote Bodog at the time asking about the decision regarding advertising and whether they like Party and others were about to leave hte U.S. They wrote back to confirm their plans while also underscoring their stance that the site was “completely legal” and a “legitimate business.”

Then a few months later, in a somewhat less legitimate-seeming turn, Bodog temporarily lost their domain. Remember in the summer of 2007 when they suddenly went offline for half a day when they lost the dot-com thanks to some legal legerdemain by an enterprising web designer who’d sued them for patent infringement? They were NewBodog.com for a short while after that, then BodogLife.com, then they finally got their dot-com back.

I know Bodog didn’t take bets from Canadians for a long time, then opened up in 2009 via bodog.ca site. Last May -- after Black Friday -- Bodog finally got rid of the dot-com site altogether, moving the operation entirely over to bodog.eu. (The Canadian site now redirects there, too, I believe.)

It wasn’t long after that (in July), that we heard about this move to eliminate the Bodog brand in the U.S. Sounded at first like Bodog was pulling out of America altogether, but we soon came to understand that wasn’t the case.

Then in September the site removed full tables from their lobby to try to thwart PokerScout and anyone else tracking what was happening on the site. Didn’t exactly work as planned, but the change did make it less simple for most of us to know what exactly was happening on the site.

And, of course, a couple of weeks ago came the move to wholly anonymous play at the poker tables, a move accompanied by a variety of stated motives but which also obviously makes it more difficult for observers to observe.

Yes, Bodog -- or Bovada -- is still here.

I’ve long stopped playing on the site. And with anonymous tables, I can’t say I’m at all enthused about ever hopping back on there again. Can’t help but continue to be intrigued by the site having endured in the U.S. to this point, though. And even if I’m not a participating citizen of Bovada, I expect I’ll still be monitoring its diplomatically difficult co-existence within American borders.