A site that promised to revolutionize modern poker shut down today when Duplicate Poker announced that they were closing their doors. In a statement sent to affiliates and members, Duplicate Poker stated,

“Duplicate Poker is sadly bidding farewell to its players and affiliates. Caught in the middle of the global financial situation the company is not able to continue to provide service.

Regretfully as of the today, October 5, 2008 we are closing our service. We thank our affiliates and players for being with us. Hopefully at later time and in a better economic climate Duplicate Poker will reappear.”

This same notice now appears on the website www.duplicatepoker.com. Players that wish to withdraw their funds may put in a request on the website.

Today’s announcement of Duplicate Poker’s closing comes as not big surprise to many as the concept was viewed as flawed from the beginning. The concept of duplicate poker was to give players at a table the same hole cards as a player in the same seat at another table. The player that won the most or lost the least with their cards were declared the winner.

The concept was to try and make poker a game of skill in an attempt to legalize the game for United States markets. Massive amounts of money were spent on advertising and marketing trying to generate interest in this product. A marketing ploy that was used to try and draw in more customers was to offer $100 per player who made a minimum deposit of $50 and earned 100 player points. One thing to note is that 100 player points would not generate but $10 in rake at the tables. The company was paying $100 to get $10. Such marketing practices usually do not result in long term profit.

In addition there were problems with traffic to the site. It seemed that many of the cash games were fairly empty and that the use of bots by the site was very prevalent. There were some complaints that the bots style of play caused losses. The games also took a long time to seat, and when the games did seat, many were at the lowest levels. Also, the speed of the software seemed to cause issues with many players. Players complained of the software running too slow.

Not all complaints were bad about the site. Many players mentioned that they were able to win money without deposits due to the freerolls the site regularly ran. Also, players reported that they were paid with very few problems overall.

The announcement of Duplicate Poker’s closing comes on the heels of Lassiters Casino shutting down. On September 9th, Lasseters Corporation Limited suspended trading due to poor performance. They then ceased operation of their online casinos immediately.

Recently it was reported that there are more online poker players today than there were even a year ago. However, when a new site enters the market, they must do something to make themselves stand out from the others. Hopefully the demise of Duplicate Poker will teach new potential gaming site owners things not to do when running their new business.

Online Poker industry is booming. Undeterred by USA ban on online gaming and France’s reluctant to open poker, casino and other gambling market online poker rooms are mushrooming. Almost every month a new online poker room is launched with a variety of poker games to keep poker enthusiast engaged in this game of skills and luck.

UK and other EU countries, Asian countries and rest of world has kept the online gaming industry alive which was otherwise doomed to be a failure after USA ban.

With emergence of new online poker rooms the competition is getting tougher. Poker rooms are offering a number of attractive goodies including sign up poker bonus to new poker players, Poker tournaments with guaranteed prize money and a number of other prizes.

Traditional online poker rooms such as Titan Poker, Mansion Poker, and Virgin Poker, survived USA ban and expanded their market base to rest of world. There are very few online poker rooms which still accept USA players.

However the future is bright for online poker industry. French Govt. has recently announced that it will be allow the gambling industry to start operations in the first half of next year. Online gaming industry is lobbying hard to get the ban lifted in USA which is certainly going to happen sooner or later given the fact that poker and other gambling is national hobby than a sinful business.