The online poker room, Bodog, has announced that they are now accepting Canadian customers. While the site, which was founded in 1994, has been largely popular and one of the largest online poker website, the site did not accept Canadian players because of businesses in Canada that would not be protected from governmental intrusions. The Canadian government has recently changed this stance, allowing Canadians at a new site bodog.ca.
This site will be incorporated with Bodog Europe and will allow Canadians to play in online poker tournaments. Bodog Europe is headed up by Keith O’Donnell. He said, “Canadian players will be able to access a Canada-specific product suite from www.bodog.ca starting in the Fall of this year. I aggressively renegotiated the Bodog Europe brand license agreement to acquire the rights to the Canadian market earlier this year and I would expect the Canadian market – extremely technologically literate, sports lovers, and a very significant poker base – to be a huge success story in 2009 and 2010.”
Canadian Bodog players will also be able to place bets on the website’s sports book and casino, which feautres a myriad of games to choose from. As a promotion, Bodog is doubling Poker Points for players who earn at least 2,000 points in the month of September. Afterwards, Bodog will deposit the bonus points into the player’s account.
This comes during a busy month for Bodog. They have already launched a new online poker network – Bodognetwork.com. Also, they are celebrating their 15th anniversary with a $15,000 Freeroll tournament.
- Update, Monday, September 21
Bodog’s 15 Days of Poker begins today, which is capped off with a $15,000 Freeroll tournament on October 15, 2009.
Pacific Poker is the poker portal of one of the most well known online gaming companies in the world – 888 Holdings. If you are at all interesting in online gambling, you will have heard the name; this is an extremely large, well respected company that trades on the stock exchange.
What that means for you as a player is that playing at Pacific Poker is going to be a safe, enjoyable, and thoroughly professional experience. One hears things from time to time about the alleged shadiness of certain sites – this is not one of them. All of the above help Pacific Poker to be one of the best online poker sites.
Let’s take a closer look.
Installing the Software
Upon visiting the Pacific Poker website, you’ll be greeted with a little popup offering you the chance to download their software. It’s around 300k in size, it really doesn’t take that long at all. Once you launch it, it fetches the rest of data it needs off the Pacific Poker servers. From start to finish, the procedure took about 6 minutes.
Of course, the installed app is for Windows based computers only. If you’re on a Mac – or simply away from your regular computer – there is an “instant play” version of the poker client that will run in any flash enabled browser. This means you can effectively play anywhere, any time, provided you have access to the Internet – which offers great flexibility.
Playing
From my experience, I’d say that Pacific Poker is built for speed. The graphics aren’t as lush as, perhaps, some of the 3D poker clients available out there today, but then you didn’t come here to look at pretty pictures. You came here to play. And what Pacific Poker offers is relentless action.
To take the client for a spin, played a few heads-up games with some willing participants. Games begin as soon as the requisite number of players have signed on for poker tournaments or sit-and-gos, and I didn’t have to wait more than 30 seconds for the action to kick off.
This site is fast. If anything, I found myself kind of wishing that I had more time to act. Granted, the length of decision time you have varies from game to game, but you need to be clear headed if you’re going to play online texas holdem.
Games
Pacific Poker offers 5 basic types of poker play: Texas Hold’em, Omaha Hi, Omaha Hi/Lo, 7 Stud, and 7 Stud Hi/Lo. This selection covers most of the popular combative styles of multi-player poker available today.
Within each section you’ll find Ring Games, Sit and Goes, Tournaments and Jackpot games. With Texas Hold’em, there’s also a Quick Seat feature that I really like – you just punch in the type of game you’re looking for and it registers you for the next game of that type. It gets you where you want to be quickly.
Banking
888 Holdings is a huge company, and do business with just about everybody. Consequently the list of deposit and withdrawal options is just about the most comprehensive I have seen anywhere. Credit cards, debit cards, 15 different kinds of bank transfer, 11 different e-Wallets (miraculously, including PayPal) … there’s definitely at least one here that you can use.
Online, all I play is turbo sit and go poker tournaments. In this style of internet poker, blinds go up every five minutes. When playing with friends at home in a live poker tournament, turbos are impossible to play. Five minutes will get you maybe two hands in with the amount of time shuffling, coloring up chips, placing blinds, and everything else.
So this weekend I got some guys over to play poker to celebrate my new basement. I had not hosted a live tournament in a while, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to manage blinds. This is how we always play, no matter how many players.
1. Start out with 1500 chips
2. Blinds go up every 15 minutes
3.Level – Blinds
1 – 5/10
2 – 10/20
3 – 25/50
4 – 50/100
5 – 100/200
6 – 200/400
7 – 400/800
For my poker tournament on Saturday, only 3 guys showed. I wasn’t sure what to use for blinds. I have used some different poker software downloads before where you can set the blinds manually, and act as a clock and alarm before. None of these offered advice or suggested what to set the blinds at though. I heard about this site Blind Valet on a couple of different poker forums, so I checked it out.
Blind Valet was one of the best poker tools I have ever used and the easiest poker software by far. I entered in how many people were playing (4), how many chips everyone should start with (1500), and we wanted 15 minute blinds. Blind Valet also asks for what the value of the poker chips you are playing with, so I entered those and clicked Calculate. Note: You can click on the images to see a larger version.
The next screen shows what the blind levels should be and how to distribute the poker chips to each player. I clicked on “customize tournament clock”.
This screen shows some customizations that you can do to the application. I was in a hurry to get the poker tournament started, so I didn’t test out any of these and clicked Launch Tournament Clock.
This program worked perfectly all night. No one had to keep track of when the blinds were coming up. The blind levels changed and updated automatically. One minute warning that blinds were going up. Alarm when the blinds are up.
The tournament blind structure that Blind Valet suggested worked out perfect. We were able to get in four games in four hours, and everyone liked the structure. If I would have used my normal structure we would have only played two.
You can click on any of the picture above to get a little better view of the screen shots. My pictures do not do this site any justice though, so just go check it out – blindValet.fr
