Bodog Flies -- The Bodog Entertainment Group, owner and operator of gaming site Bodog.com, has fulfilled its goal of taking its brand to the skies. The company signed a $500,000 deal in February with InterAir Media, a media broker specializing in the airline industry, to sponsor six branded Allegiant Air airplanes flying from Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport. The six planes were to bear the Bodog.com name inside and out, with crews making in-flight announcements about the site for three months. Last week the first Bodog branded jet made its maiden voyage; the other five are scheduled for take off with the Bodog brand on Tuesday.
GP Doesn't -- A Joplin, Mo. man will send his wife's Dodge Neon off a 150-foot cliff on Saturday, and online casino Golden Palace has paid to take the plunge with it. For a winning bid of $2,550, the publicity-grabbing I-gaming group will have its logo and Web site URL plastered on the side of Will Stuckenberg's car as it plummets over a cliff into a rock quarry in south Joplin. "We like to be the first to do things, and we're pretty sure the next guy who decides to auction off space on his car and drive it off a cliff will not receive nearly as much attention as the first guy to do it," said Jeff Kay, a spokesman for GoldenPalace.com. Stuckenberg decided to auction the space on eBay after he bought his wife a brand new minivan.
Mansion Live -- Online casino and sports book Mansion is finally launching online poker with the release of a free-play preview version available for download at Mansion.com. In preparing for the launch, Mansion has partnered with Fox Sports to produce the Poker Dome Series, which will broadcast every Sunday from the Neonopolis mall in Las Vegas beginning May 15. The entire tournament will take place within the Mansion Poker dome, a sound-proof, one-way mirrored dome through which the audience can see, but the players cannot.
Gambling and Teleshopping -- British commercial broadcaster ITV is exploring the idea of launching gambling and teleshopping channels as it tries to build on its new viewer-participation game show channel, ITV Play. Casino gaming via television is illegal, but ITV is hoping that the government will relax this restriction in its forthcoming reform of gaming laws. Jeff Henry, who runs ITV's new consumer division, said he believes ITV could make a success of gambling and teleshopping because it can cross-promote via the mass audiences it generates on ITV1.
GOOOAAL! -- Everest Casino announced today the launch of a new football-themed video slot machine called "GOOOAAL!" "Football is arguably the most popular sport in the world," Eduardo Santos, Everest Casino's property manager, explained, "so it made sense for us to choose a sports theme that would have universal appeal. Plus with the World Cup coming up in June, we knew football fever would be skyrocketing in countries all over Europe, Asia and the Americas."
Quoteworthy -- "Imagine that you go to the grocery store and pick up a delicious chocolate cake. A government officer tells you that eating cake is bad for you and will make you fat. You tell him that you get regular exercise and that eating the cake won't affect your health, and that he has no business telling you what you can or can't eat, but this falls on deaf ears because there's a law that bans bad eating habits. Ridiculous, right? This is exactly what's happening with legal bans on gambling, such as bans on online gambling proposed by Congressmen Bob Goodlatte and Jim Leach."
- An excerpt from an article written by fourth-year UCLA student Chad Hansen for the school's newspaper, the Daily Bruin. The article, titled " Bans on Online Gambling Infringe upon Freedom," can be read in its entirety online at DailyBruin.ucla.edu.