Full Tilt Poker Buys Domain Names of Rivals, Players

Purchasing domain names is a common money-making scheme. It involves acquiring the URLs of people, places, or objects that will one day become valuable and then selling them at a hefty profit as well as capitalizing off of common misspellings of words. Recently, blogger Nat Arem unearthed a list of sites purchased by Full Tilt Poker. They correspond to popular poker personalities and even misspellings of rival online poker sites.

Two notable derivations of its competition’s domain names are owned by the site. The first is ansolutepoker.com, which is one letter off from Absolute Poker’s domain name. In fact, the “b” and “n” keys are located adjacent to one another on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Visits to the Tokwiro-owned room may have skyrocketed in recent weeks after the story about its cheating scandal aired on 60 Minutes and appeared in an accompanying article in the Washington Post newspaper. Absolute Poker also gained publicity by merging with sister site Ultimate Bet.

Full Tilt Poker also owns the rights to hallywoodpoker.com, which is one letter off from the name of Ongame Network room Hollywood Poker. World Poker Tour host Vince Van Patten is the front man for this online poker site, which does not accept customers from the United States. The “o” and “a” keys are located on opposite sides of a standard keyboard.

Sponsored pros of other online poker rooms have their own domain names owned by Full Tilt. They include Adam Levy, who is known as Roothlus in the online poker world. The domain name adamlevypoker.com is on the list of Full Tilt owned URLs. However, Levy is a member of Ultimate Bet’s Star Players Team, which also includes Tiffany Michelle and Tracy Scala. Full Tilt also owns granthinklepoker.com. Hinkle, who became one-half of only the second pair of brothers ever to win WSOP bracelets, is a part of Team Bodog according to a June post made on that online poker room.

Visiting andreakkaripoker.com will also take you to Full Tilt. Akkari is a member of Team PokerStars Pro and recently won the Sunday 500 on his employer’s site. Another member of Team PokerStars Pro who has a domain name owned by Full Tilt Poker is Victor Ramdin. Visiting victorramdinpoker.com will send you to Full Tilt.

Arem also identified domain names owned by Full Tilt Poker that belong to players who are not permitted to play on its tables due to multi-accounting, which violates the site’s Terms of Service. They include sorelmizzi.net, chrisvaughnpoker.com, and nickneirgarth.com. Vaughan was the former Managing Editor of Bluff Magazine and became the center of an account selling incident with Mizzi, who is known as Imper1um online.

There are several players also mentioned who are not yet Full Tilt sponsored pros, although the online poker room already owns their domain names. They include Joe Ward (who is known in the online poker world as LatestLines2), Terrence Chan (who finished second in a Six-Handed No Limit Hold’em event during the 2007 World Series of Poker), 2008 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker winner Carter King (ckingusc in the online poker world), and Matt Matros, who finished third in the 2004 World Poker Tour Championship.

Domain names of players that are not listed as members of Full Tilt Poker, but are still owned by the company, include codyslaubaugh.com, isaachaxton.com, jasonmercierpoker.com, shannonelizabethfulltiltpoker.com, and texbarch.net. Other domain names that are owned by Full Tilt Poker include casinoriotijuana.com, funplaypoker.com, and thepokerrace.com.

Arem told Poker News Daily that the information contained in his blog came from DomainTools.com. In light of the case in Kentucky involving the possible seizure of its main domain name, FullTiltPoker.com, the site recently purchased FullTilt.com. The latter URL now forwards to FullTiltPoker.com.