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Bet365 Owners near Billionaire Status, Poker770 Upgrades Client and More

Poker HandIn this week’s trip around online poker our first stop will be a look at the Coates family, owners of Bet365, who are on their way to becoming the first gaming billionaires in British history — and by billionaires I mean British sterling not USD, which makes it all the more impressive! Our second feature will outline the recent changes/upgrades to the Poker 770 VIP Program. And in our final story of the week we will check-up on real-money online poker in Nevada, and take a look at 888 Poker’s efforts to prepare for the monumental launch.

Bet365 Valued at £800 Billion: Family Worth Near £1 Billion

This weekend the DailyMail.co.uk ran an interesting story on the Coates’ family, the family at the helm of online gaming giant Bet365. Known mainly for its status as one of the top sports-betting sites on the Internet, Bet365 has also managed to gain a foothold in the world of online poker as part of the iPoker Network, the second largest online poker provider in the world, using their reputation and brand recognition to become one of the network’s top skins.

According to the article in the Daily Mail, the Coates family is closing in on a net worth of £1,000,000,000, with Bet365 making up most of the family’s assets as the Bet365 brand and its assets are valued at around £800,000,000.

So who are the Coates’? The patriarch of the family is 75 year-old Peter who started Bet365 some 13 years ago and continues to play a role as the company’s Chairman, while daughter Denise (45) and son John (43) run the day-to-day operation at Bet365. Peter Coates is the definition of a self-made man, having left school at age 14, served in the Parachute Regiment, and worked his way up through the ranks of Wimpy’s Restaurant to become a Regional Manager before starting his own catering business – and now he’s nearly a billionaire. Peter Coates was also the founder of Signal Radio in 1983, an independent local radio station in Britain, and the lifelong football fan also owns the Premier League’s Stoke City (for the second time).

A special thanks to Wikipedia, which is where I found the information on Peter Coates for this piece.

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Poker 770 Revamps VIP Loyalty Program

Along with the rest of the iPoker Network, Poker 770 will be overhauling their VIP Rewards Program, with a new program that allows each individual skin to customize the upper levels of their VIP Program, choosing from some 54 different new levels/tiers. These changes are set to be unveiled in the coming weeks.

The new program appears to be for upper-level players, offering “Elite” statuses, and will work in conjunction with the VIP Program already in place across the network. According to PokerStrategy.com these added levels will include:

  • Up to 54 new reward levels

  • Flexible downgrade protection settings

  • New progress bar graphics and design

  • Advanced mechanism for shifted/fixed accumulation periods, including up to 12 months accumulated periods.

The new levels seem to signal a concerted effort by iPoker to challenge PokerStars for the online poker world’s high-volume players by creating similar reward levels to PokerStars highly popular Supernova and Supernova Elite levels.

We’ll keep you posted as more information becomes available and when Poker 770 rolls out their version of the new VIP Rewards Program.

Poker 770 is offering a $7.70 free bankroll this month.

888 Poker Prepping for US Online Poker Launch

With the entire world is eagerly anticipating the launch of real-money online poker in Nevada (any day now they keep saying…) the online poker providers who have been granted licenses are also working on their marketing and branding efforts for the completely untapped market. One such company is 888 Poker who received the go-ahead from Nevada, and will be providing their online poker software to several licensed Nevada rooms including Las Vegas casino Treasure Island, and an exclusivity deal with Caesars Entertainment, the parent company of the World Series of Poker and the WSOP.com brand.

“In Nevada we are awaiting final sign-off by the gaming control board on our software,” 888 CEO Brian Mattingley told Reuters this week. Adding that the company isn’t expecting to see much in the way of hard data on the profitability of its online poker endeavors in Nevada until 2015 as most revenue will likely be turned right back around into marketing efforts: “I imagine we will start to see some really influential numbers to our business from 2015,” Mattingley told Reuters.

The early competition in the Nevada market is likely to be very fierce as multiple providers try to attract a very small number of Nevada residents to their product –Nevada’s population numbers only about 2.7 million people.

Find out how you can get £12 free with a no deposit offer from 888.

Steve Ruddock

Steve has been writing about online poker news for about as long as there has been online poker news to write about. A contributor to over a dozen sites, Steve handles our weekly Around Online Poker news wrap up.

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