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.

Bodog Catcher

Nearly a year after the Black Friday indictments -- and a long, long time since the feds first took an interest in Calvin Ayre and his Bodog gambling website -- Bodog’s dot-com domain was seized yesterday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. And this morning we have learned that Ayre has been indicted for operating an illegal gambling business offering sports betting and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

News of the domain seizure came last night, about two months after Bodog had shuffled everyone over to its new Bovada.lv site where Americans continue to play anonymous poker and bet on sports unimpeded.

It was just a few hours ago that news of the Ayre indictment being unsealed appeared over on Forbes. According to Nathan Vardi, the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore is charging Ayre with having violated Maryland state law by running (with others) his illegal gambling business “from June 2005 to January 2012.” Vardi explains that the indictment also highlights the moving of funds to and from various international accounts as well as “the hiring of media resellers and advertisers to promote Internet gambling.”

The fact that the feds have finally gotten to the point of acting with regard to Ayre and Bodog is noteworthy. Indeed, for a lot of observers one of the early follow-up thoughts regarding the Black Friday indictment and civil complaint targeting PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute/UB was “What about Bodog?”

The feds had seized funds from accounts being used by Bodog way back in 2008, and of course had been watching the site long before that. And even if Bodog was small scale, poker-wise, there was the sports betting. But it took 10-plus more months for any action against Bodog to arrive.

It will be interesting, of course, to see whether or not these moves will preface further efforts by the U.S. government to deal with Bovada’s continued acceptance of U.S. bets, or if their last-minute move back in December will successfully shield the operation from any interruption of service.

Some are responding to the news about Bodog and Ayre with cries of “Merge is next,” although it seems like the fact that Bodog/Bovada has always offered sports betting makes it a different animal than the other, small poker-only sites continuing to serve Americans. The allegations concerning advertising are interesting, too, perhaps having to do with the continued prominence of Bodog’s sportsbook in the U.S. as well as its popularity among American sports bettors.

Merge’s days in the U.S. may well be numbered, especially if any of the cashout procedures being used by the network’s sites make them vulnerable to those conspiracy to commit money laundering and/or bank fraud charges. Recall that alarm sounded Subject:Poker last September that the “DOJ Plans Action Against Merge.” While nothing ever came of that, those whispers that were then loudly relayed apparently emanated from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, too.

Since this Ayre indictment specifically references sports betting, the only form of online gambling unequivocally covered by the Federal Wire Act according to the DOJ’s revised opinion back in December, I don’t necessarily think this news has too much to do with the current prospects for Merge or other U.S.-facing poker sites. Other than to indicate in a general way what we already knew, namely, that the policing of online gambling continues to be of interest to prosecutors. (For more on the Ayre indictment, see Michael Gentile’s analysis over on PokerFuse.)

Still, even if the status of Merge and the other sites hasn’t changed, it remains tenuous. Maybe Bovada will post a line for us to bet on how long the remaining sites’ will last.

Stop Counting Me! Bodog vs. PokerScout

Here’s something sorta curious.

You might’ve heard how just a week or so ago Bodog changed its software so as to make it more difficult for tracking sites and those interested in “datamining” to do their thing. The site removed full tables from being listed in the lobby, thus making it harder to see at a glance what’s happening on the site.

Other sites have it set up as an optional feature to remove full tables from the lobby view, but now on Bodog you can’t see ’em even if you wanted to. As I understand it, they’ve also gotten rid of waitlists, too.

I report this somewhat second-handedly, as I haven’t really been on the Bodog site for quite some time. I used to play on it regularly, but long ago pulled my money from the site. I sometimes wish now that I’d left a pittance on there with which to mess around. But to be honest, when I thought of the possible futures for the sites on which I was then playing -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Bodog -- for a long time it seemed like the latter was the most likely to be the most risky on which to leave money thanks to its inclusion of sports betting.

In any case, I’ve heard the dataminers are starting to find ways to work around this new obstacle, but I’m not up on the specifics. Meanwhile PokerScout, the site that provides traffic info on all the online sites, found itself momentarily thwarted by Bodog’s new system and thus unable to track numbers. A story on PokerFuse from last week described the changes at Bodog as well as how they were affecting PokerScout’s ability to track Bodog’s traffic.

Apparently PokerScout was also able to overcome the new challenge and start reporting numbers again for Bodog, but meanwhile a brouhaha has developed between the two sites. I first noticed this conflict via some tweets between the two, then early this morning Bodog fired a fairly inflammatory-sounding shot via an article on Bodog owner Calvin Ayre’s site titled “PokerScout.com’s Extortion Attempt.”

It should be noted that articles appearing on Ayre’s site are occasionally of dubious origin and/or intention, many of them existing as fairly obvious SEO-grabs presented under the superficial auspices of news reports or editorials. Thus do I always find myself reading articles there with a measure of skepticism, knowing that they are often necessarily self-interested and/or biased in one way or another.

This article stands out, however, as it not only comments (negatively) on PokerScout’s efforts to track Bodog’s traffic, but flat out accuses PokerScout of trying to extort money from Bodog.

Say wha?

When making the change last week, Bodog explicitly referred (in another article) to its desire to stop PokerScout from keeping count of its players (which, it ought to be noted, is markedly different from the full-fledged datamining performed by other sites). In “The Death of the Poker Volume Tracking Model,” Bodog argued that since PokerScout “serve[d] no beneficial purpose to the poker industry other than to feed the sharks” with its data, Bodog wanted to help the non-sharks by keeping PokerScout from filing its reports.

As mentioned, PokerScout was nonetheless able to keep on tracking Bodog’s traffic, or at least that is what they claimed. As PokerScout explained (in an article posted yesterday), they are still able to estimate traffic at Bodog and thus are keeping the site listed. Also noted there was the fact that Bodog was the only online poker site that had ever asked PokerScout not to track their traffic, a request with which PokerScout decided not to comply.

In today’s missive, Bodog notes that in fact there were two reasons why they had earlier asked to be removed from PokerScout’s listings.

First was that desire to protect the non-sharks or “recreational poker players” whom Bodog claims are somehow being hurt by the information PokerScout provided. “The second reason,” explains Bill Beatty in today’s calvinayre.com article, is “the US Department of Justice had just indicted the top 3 poker sites listed in the PokerScout.com rankings.”

To be honest, I understand the second reason a lot more than I do the first. Sounds like Bodog would like to grow, but would also like for no one to notice they are growing, thus perhaps helping them continue evade being targeted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“It wasn’t a time where poker companies wanted to raise their profile,” continues Beatty. “It might have been putting a huge target on their chests. Potentially if Stars, Tilt and AP/UB had not been sitting at the top of these ranking sites, who knows if the DOJ would have had such a hard on to take them down.”

Beatty is being more than a little disingenuous here, I’d say. Stars, Full Tilt, and UB/AP had a pretty high profile even without PokerScout’s reports. Indeed, I think it would have been a pretty simple matter for anyone to conclude those sites were the four biggest worldwide back in April -- and by far the biggest U.S.-facing sites -- even if PokerScout didn’t exist.

In any case, then comes the bombshell from Beatty when he claims PokerScout said they would remove Bodog from the listings in return for “a seven figure extortion payment” which Bodog ultimately refused to pay.

PokerScout has tweeted a response that appears to deny the accusation. “More lies about PokerScout coming from the Bodog-mouthpiece website,” was the message. “What a surprise. So disappointing.”

Here comes Bodog, making a pretty serious accusation against PokerScout, characterizing the traffic-tracking site as having engaged in “unethical and potentially criminal behaviour” (i.e., the alleged extortion attempt). Meanwhile, Bodog continues to serve U.S. customers, thus subjecting itself to similar accusations from certain parties, including those who are in a position to do something about what they interpret to be “criminal behaviour.”

Like I say, sorta curious.

Getting harder to count how many are playing on Bodog, I guess. Meanwhile, in the poker world, it is becoming easier to count on such conflicts cropping up, not to mention increasingly weird ideas of what is and what is not “unethical.”