Home / Poker News March 2012 / Bovada Poker – a Destination for US Players
Bovada Poker – a Destination for US Players
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2012-03-07 16:06
Bodog had been one of the last bastions of online poker play for US-based players before December 2011, when the brand finally decided to follow most of the other major operators and previous
US poker sites, and withdrew from the US market for good. Since then, not much good transpired for Bodog.com: the FBI seized the site which had been dormant for a couple of months before the legal move. Bodog founder Calvin Ayre has been indicted too. Luckily for the US public, just before the December withdrawal, Bodog split its operation, creating a new online poker destination for US players called Bovada. The old Bodog operation is still alive and well, and it is still serving poker players from around the globe, with the exception of the US.
Bovada, the new operation, does not accept players from outside of the US.
Bovada is obviously Bodog’s attempt to position itself for the time when federal regulation concerning online poker is passed. The name of the operation reflects the merger of the words Bodog and Nevada, the first US jurisdiction to fully legalize and regulate online poker and gambling. The site is hosted on a .lv domain, another reference to Las Vegas.
Whether or not the move was an economically sound one remains to be seen. One thing is certain though: given the legal status of online poker in Nevada, the operation has pretty much already taken advantage of the only available legal loophole in the US to continue bringing the Bodog brand of action to loyal as well as to newly registered US players.
The Bovada move barely affected traffic volume on the Bodog network. Non US players may have noticed a slight dip, but given the fact that US peak hours are different from peak hours world over, the impact was quite insignificant.
Bovada was only briefly offline when the player database was moved, and it has since started drawing traffic of its own.
