Poker News

In an e-mail sent to its affiliate marketers this week, Bodog announced that it will be expanding into 15 Latin American countries next week. That concise e-mail is as follows:

We are excited to announce that, as of February 15, our partnered brands Bovada and Bodog will be launching their product offerings in Latin America.

Bovada Sports and Casino will be available in Mexico only while Bodog Poker, Casino, and Sports will launch in the following countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia [sic], Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.

Those Central and South American countries are not ones that normally get all that much press when it comes to online poker; most of the attention goes to the United States and various European countries primarily because of their large player pools and online gambling legal wranglings. But this is interesting not only because of the size of several of those countries but also because right now, Bodog and its related sites are only open to players in the United States, Canada, China, and Vietnam.

Bovada is the U.S.-facing arm that re-branded from Bodog a number of years ago; it will now serve just the United States and Mexico.

Thus, if you do the arithmetic, that means that Bodog itself is only accessible in Canada, China, and Vietnam (the latter two countries are served by the Bodog88 brand). Adding 15 more countries to the mix should be quite the boon for Bodog’s poker traffic.

You may notice in the e-mail above that it is Bovada Sports and Casino that will be available in Mexico. That name does not include the word “poker.” In August 2016, Bovada sold its online poker business to Ignition Casino. Bovada was one of the few poker networks/sites that still accepted U.S. customers; it’s American player-base went to Ignition, as did its Mexican players.

There is some confusion in the industry as to who Ignition actually is, but it seems to be very closely related to Bodog. Ignition and Bodog share player pools at the tables, so the expansion into Latin America will also help Ignition greatly. Speculation in the poker community is that much of the new traffic will be seen at micro and low stakes tables, as many of the new countries have households of lower average income than in the U.S. and Canada.

PokerScout currently ranks Ignition as the sixth-largest poker room or network on the internet with a seven-day average of 1,150 cash game players (note that this does not take into account tournament traffic), the same size as partypoker. Bodog has blocked PokerScout’s ability to see its traffic numbers for several years now, so its exact poker population is unknown.

NOTE: According to professionalrakeback.com, Costa Rica will not be one of the countries included in the Bodog expansion.

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