Ultimate Poker.com was the first legal and regulated online poker site in the United States of America. [1] [2] [3] Ultimate Poker operated in Nevada and New Jersey. [4]
UltimatePoker.com went online at 9 AM PDT on April 30, 2013 providing online poker competitions to individuals in Nevada. [5] The initial operation started as a 30-day trial period to allow a shakeout of the technologies involved to determine adherence to the Nevada State Gaming Control Board's requirements for verifying that the player is physically within the state of Nevada and of the correct age. [6] [7]
On November 14, 2014, parent company Ultimate Gaming closed down its Ultimate Poker operation because the Nevada-based site's revenues fell far short of projected expectations. [8]
Jacob Christopher "Tito" Ortiz is an American mixed martial artist and politician. He is currently signed to the Combate Americas promotion. Ortiz is best known for his stints with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), where he is a former Light Heavyweight Champion, having held the title from April 14, 2000, to September 26, 2003. Later competing for Bellator MMA. Along with fighters like Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell, he was one of the sport's early stars. Ortiz ultimately became the biggest pay-per-view draw of 2006 for his fights with Liddell, Forrest Griffin, and Ken Shamrock.
Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It has been partly responsible for a huge increase in the number of poker players worldwide. Christiansen Capital Advisors stated online poker revenues grew from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion in 2005, while a survey carried out by DrKW and Global Betting and Gaming Consultants asserted online poker revenues in 2004 were at $1.4 billion. In a testimony before the United States Senate regarding Internet Gaming, Grant Eve, a Certified Public Accountant representing the US Accounting Firm Joseph Eve, Certified Public Accountants, estimated that one in every four dollars gambled is gambled online.
Anne LaBarr Duke is an American former professional poker player and author in cognitive-behavioral decision science and decision education. She holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history, and is still in the top four as of September 2021, despite being retired from poker, last cashing at a tournament 2010. Duke won the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the National Heads-Up Poker Championship in 2010. She has written a number of instructional books for poker players, including Decide to Play Great Poker and The Middle Zone, and she published her autobiography, How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker, in 2005. Duke also authored two books on decision-making, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, and How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. She has been a repeat guest on the investing podcast "Investor Hour."
Russ Hamilton is an American poker player. He was the 1994 World Series of Poker main event champion, defeating Hugh Vincent in heads-up play to win $1 million in first-prize money as well as his body weight in silver. Following his World Series win, Hamilton served as a consultant for Ultimate Bet, an online poker server. In 2008, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission found Hamilton largely responsible for cheating players on Ultimate Bet out of $6.1 million through software that allowed access to opponents' hole cards. In 2009, Kahnawake increased the $6.1 million estimate to $22,100,000.
bwin.party Digital Entertainment was an online gambling company, formed by the March 2011 merger of PartyGaming plc and bwin Interactive Entertainment AG. Formerly the world's largest publicly traded online gambling firm, it was best known for its online poker room PartyPoker, World Poker Tour and its sports betting brand bwin.
Online gambling is any kind of gambling conducted on the internet. This includes virtual poker, casinos and sports betting. The first online gambling venue opened to the general public, was ticketing for the Liechtenstein International Lottery in October 1994. Today the market is worth around $40 billion globally each year, according to various estimates.
Michael Matusow is an American professional poker player residing in Henderson, Nevada. Matusow's nickname of "The Mouth" reflects his reputation for trash-talking at the poker table.
888 Holdings PLC, known commonly as 888.com, is a public company which owns several popular gambling brands and websites, including 888sport, 888casino and 888poker. 888 is based in Gibraltar. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
PokerStars is an online poker cardroom that was a part of The Stars Group until it was sold to Flutter Entertainment on May 5, 2020. It can be accessed through downloadable poker clients for the Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It is the largest real money online poker site in the world, controlling over two-thirds of the total online poker market.
Full Tilt Poker is an Irish online poker card room and online casino that opened in June 2004. Formerly privately owned by Tiltware, LLC and later by the Rational Entertainment Group, the site was acquired by The Stars Group in a deal where Amaya acquired all of Rational's assets, including PokerStars. A statement by Amaya said the takeover would not affect the activities of Full Tilt Poker. The deal was closed on August 1, 2014.
bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, formerly known as betandwin, is an Austrian online betting brand acquired by Entain PLC. The group operated under international and regional licences in countries like Gibraltar, the Amerindian reserve of Kahnawake (Canada), and Belize; and Germany, Italy, Mexico, Croatia, Austria, France, and the United Kingdom in Europe. bwin offered sports betting, poker, casino games, soft and skill games with most revenue coming from poker and sports betting. bwin had over 20 million registered customers in more than 25 core markets. Competence centres were located in Vienna, Stockholm, and Gibraltar.
Martin Kampmann Frederiksen is a retired Danish professional mixed martial artist who competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He is a former Cage Warriors World Middleweight Champion.
Thomas Breitling is an American entrepreneur.
Gambling in New Jersey includes casino gambling in Atlantic City, the New Jersey Lottery, horse racing, off-track betting, charity gambling, amusement games, and social gambling. New Jersey's gambling laws are among the least restrictive in the United States. In 2013, the state began to allow in-state online gambling. Five years later, the state won a lawsuit that dismantled Nevada's monopoly on legal sports betting.
PartyGaming plc was a network of gambling sites operated by Ruth Parasol in the Caribbean. Founded in 1997, the network eventually operated under an umbrella company called iGlobalMedia, which then changed its name to PartyGaming. PartyGaming's flagship site, PartyPoker.com, was launched in 2001. Its primary shareholders were Parasol, Group Operations Director Anurag Dikshit, Marketing Director Vikrant Bhargava, and Russ DeLeon.
United States v. Scheinberg, No. 1:10-cr-00336 (2011), is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus, and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering to process transfers to and from their customers. A companion civil case, United States v. PokerStars, et al., 11 Civ. 2564 (2011), included Full Tilt and Cereus as defendants and seeks the recovery of forfeiture equalling approximately $3 billion in assets belonging to the companies. After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers. Three years after the start of the poker boom in 2003, the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for illegal online gambling a crime; however, the defendant companies remained in the U.S. market in the belief that the law did not cover poker. A former payment processor for the companies turned state's evidence after initially being charged with violating UIGEA himself. On September 20, the civil suit was amended claiming individual fraud by Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson and Rafael Furst.
Mark E. Brown is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist. Brown is a Chief Executive Officer of Miracle Flights, a national US charity, and a former executive vice president of The Howard Hughes Corporation. He is also the former Partner and President of R&R Partners, the ad agency which created the "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas" advertising campaign for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. In addition, Brown was a founder and director of Service 1st Bank of Nevada, and previously served as the President of MBC Communications.
Jason Scott 'JCarver' Somerville is an American poker player specializing in Texas Hold'em. He has one World Series of Poker bracelet and 3.9 million in live tournament results. He is the founder of Run It UP, a video/live stream series where viewers are encouraged to "watch, listen, and learn as he turns $50 into $10,000". He has been a contributor to the PokerVT training team as an advanced instructor in poker tournaments and a "Ones to Watch" for the World Poker Tour XI Season.
888poker, formerly Pacific Poker, is an international online poker cardroom and network owned by 888 Holdings. 888poker was established in 2002, and is based in Gibraltar.
UFC 168: Weidman vs. Silva 2 was a mixed martial arts event held on December 28, 2013, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.