In late October Cake Poker announced the launch of the Gold Card Exchange. In this exchange players can trade their gold cards with other players and receive cash. This type of exchange is unique to online poker. No other poker room has this type of promotion so no other poker could have this type of exchange for promotional items.

This new feature has brought back old, inactive players back into Cake Poker and their skins. Players don’t have to worry about depositing because even their lowly two of clubs are now worth money. I sold about 20 two of clubs from the 2006 series for over $10 each not to mention many of my other gold cards. If you know of any Cake Poker players from 2006 and 2007 you might want to let them know about this new feature so they can become active at Cake Poker again.

Players can put in buy and sell orders just like on commodities or stock exchanges. Just like with an exchange like those a commission is taken. Cake Poker or the participating skin takes 10% of the trade from the seller on any trade $.10 or higher.
Players do not receive rakeback on these trades and affiliates do not receive any revenue share off of these trades either.

While players do not receive rakeback on these trades and affiliates do not receive any revenue share off of these trades either if you are their affiliate it is to your advantage to let these players know they have money waiting on them. You will at least receive revenue share off of their play if they go to the tables with their proceeds from the sale of their gold cards. This unique feature and the addition of more gold card freerolls should help Cake Poker rebuild their traffic, at least in the short term.

In July I started training a new support department to take over my job at PAS. After two and a half years it was time to do something different. On August 15th I started a two month leave of absence. I did this to get packed and move from South Dakota to Las Vegas. I also took this time to come up with a new concept for PAS that I could work on.

After two and a half years with PAS I realized that even though I worked remotely I fit into the PAS culture. I had been with PAS since we only had a handful of employees working out of a small house. The company has grown exponentially since then. We certainly share common goals. The company has great visions that I know I fit into and the company will continue to grow, something that is impossible for most companies to do during these tough times. This new project is a dream job for me. It fits perfectly into my lifestyle and my desire to live in Las Vegas.

Once we get closer to getting the new project live I will post more about it. Right now it is still under development so I can’t give too much away. If you know me you can probably make some good guesses when you add Pokeraddict + Las Vegas + dream job together. Let the speculation begin and in a few weeks I should be able to post more about it.

Just a few weeks after Ongame launched their proprietary "Ongame Essence" formula Bodog changed their formula as well. The new Bodog formula would appear to be based on the same concept as Ongame Essence.

Bodog has been very public this year about their opinion of rakeback. Jonas Odman, Vice President of the Bodog Network, wrote this article earlier this year. It took until June for Bodog to make their first anti rakeback strike. On June 15th Bodog stopped allowing new players to get rakeback. Existing players were grandfathered in and still are allowed to receive rakeback.

Bodog had never really allowed rakeback. Their position was that it was your commission and you could do whatever you wanted to do with it. You just couldn't publicly offer rakeback and Bodog would not facilitate the transfers. There wasn't any other online poker room that this type of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Not long after Bodog banned rakeback for new players they introduced their new rake formula. The formula is based on the player's overall win rate and skill level just like Ongame's system. I am sure it is not a coincidence that part of the Bodog Network management team once was a part of the Ongame management team.

There is one major difference between Ongame's Essence and Bodog's new formula. At Ongame a player actually earns points at a rate based upon the new formula which affects their bonus clear rate as well as their VIP status. Bodog decided to only have the formula affect how they pay affiliates. A player that does not receive rakeback on Bodog would never notice any kind of change.

There were some reporting bugs at first. For example players reported that they had tournament overlays deducted from MGR. Bodog has since corrected the bugs and stats are being reported smoothly. Only time will tell if Ongame and Bodog are pioneers in the online poker industry or if this concept alienates too many players to be a sustainable model. Since neither Ongame or Bodog will release the details of their formula any network that wishes to base their rake distribution on player skill will have to come up with their own formula.

It was discovered today that the Ultimatebet.com domain now redirects to Depositbonus.com. Ultimate Bet decided to rebrand themselves as UB.com earlier this year. Recently affiliates were told to change their links from Ultimatebet.com to UB.com. While the understanding was affiliates had 90 days to make this change it appears now that wasn't the case. Any link that points to Ultimatebet.com now redirects to this Depositbonus.com site regardless of whether it is an affiliate link or not. If you don't change your links you will be sending this portal owner your players. All PAS links have been changed on our end. If you promote UB.com with your own affiliate account please make sure your links are working.

Obviously this is an interesting situation. How did this happen? Who owns this domain? Does this have anything to do with the recent sale of Cereus? We will continue to look into this and post any information we receive.

Yesterday Blanca Games announced that they acquired the Cereus Network. It would seem most would embrace a shakeup at Cereus to give players familiar with their cheating scandals a chance to trust them again. It certainly seems like a good strategy to me. I decided to do some more digging into who exactly Blanca Games is.

Their CEO Stuart Gordon is involved with Bingo Mania. According to their website they have been in business since 1996. I was unable to find anything bad about their business, in fact there were quite a few positive things that were said about it by players in situations where I believe the opinions given were impartial. This was great to discover.

I did have some concerns though. First the Blanca Games website consists of only the one press release I linked to in this post. The meta title for that page is the exact same as the contact us page. There is no other information about them on their site besides an email address for contact.

I also ran a whois for the blancagames.com domain. It was just registered in July. That in itself isn't too big of a deal, their own press release states they were set up to acquire existing properties and the CEO's reputation should certainly earn him the benefit of the doubt here. The real concern I have is that it was only purchased for a year. Even if it is only to make the Googlebot happy you should buy your domain quite a few years out. This was one of the first things I learned. On top of this they have not secured any similar domains such as their .net or singular form blancagame.com. These could turn out to be mistakes down the road.

It's too soon to say what might happen. Some have speculated this is just a shell game. As much of a pessimist as I usually am I am going to give the new group time before I make any judgment. Cereus has been successful even with several very public issues over the years. If a group can come in and clean up Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet's image they may very well strike gold. I certainly wish them luck.