Sportsbook.com to Launch New U.S.-Facing Online Poker Site

More reshuffling, as online-poker entities reorganize and reinvent themselves in an effort to return to the U.S. market....

Here is a review of Sportsbook.com Poker as done by a player who recently began playing some online poker there.

It wasn't that long ago that SportingBet PLC, the British-based bookmaking and gambling concern, announced that it had sold off its Sportsbook.com division for a measly dollar to separate its publicly-held self from U.S. regulatory concerns. (Newshounds may remember that it wasn't long ago that a famed SportingBet billboard on the strip in Vegas housing $100,000 in plain sight was robbed, certainly an expensive form of advertising.)

Anyhow, as reported over at Professional-Poker.com, the spun-off portion of the company, Sportsbook.com, has announced plans for a new online room that will be open to U.S. poker players. The new room will be among several recent entries to feature "no download," Flash-based poker software, which I predicted some time ago would be the wave of the future in online poker rooms.

Sportsbook.com's new poker room is available as a beta site right now, and it likes they'll be launching in style --- they've announced a series of 57 consecutive nightly freerolls as a way to draw initial consumer interest to the site. While these freerolls have nominal cash prizes themselves, the top ten finishers in each night's tourney will qualify for a large end-of-promotion event on January 20th, with a shot at a $100,000 grand prize.