There were a couple of big developments in the industry this week. This biggest news came from the Cake Poker Network. Effective May 1st all Cake Poker Network sites will change the way MGR is calculated. Cake Poker announced what is basically the end for advantage players bouncing from skin to skin to take advantage of first deposit bonuses across the network. The new rules are:

1. Nothing will be deducted from the player’s rakeback. Currently players have deposit fees, bonuses, store purchases and promotions.

2. Affiliates will still have these items deducted. This means player stats in Cake Poker’s software will not match reported stats in our system because our stats will show the deductions that are deducted from affiliate pay.

3. Points will be earned at one half the current rate. This will make the bonus without rakeback unattractive to bonus hunter players. Since players are only allowed one rakeback account on the network this will make 33% rakeback better than the bonuses will be as the best rakeback rate with the bonus will be 30% rakeback and 18% at short handed.

In my opinion this is good news for us for multiple reasons:

1. Players will now have to remain loyal to their rakeback skin on the network. We will no longer lose player’s action while they go hit every bonus offer on the network.

2. Since players will not have items deducted they will earn more rakeback. The more rakeback they have the longer losing players will stay afloat. This will also cut back on our deposit fee hit as players will have to make fewer deposits since they will be getting more rakeback.

3. Since it takes twice as long to earn points towards the store or other promotions our promotion deduction should go down by around 50%.

4. We will probably take a smaller hit on bonuses since they will be much harder to clear and expire after 90 days.

This situation is a slight positive for rakeback affiliates, a positive for rakeback players loyal to one skin, a negative for non rakeback affiliates that heavily promote bonuses and a huge negative for bonus hunting or advantage players. In my opinion ending the bonus hunting is exactly the network’s goal here.

The other news this week was that Bodog settled with 1st Technology. They had a dispute where 1st Technology won a default judgment over a patent dispute. They won the domain Bodog.com. This week Bodog was able to recover the domain in a settlement as well as all of the other domains that were lost. This should definitely help in marketing Bodog. At this time Bodog.com forwards to the domain that has been used since the judgment, Bodoglife.com.

Check back next week for more industry news. It appears there will be quite a few May promotions from our partners.