Internet super-behemoth Google seems to be wasting little time positioning themselves to profit from licensed internet gambling in the United States by investing in “social gaming”.  Both the New York Times and Techcrunch are reporting that Google has agreed to purchase “Slide”, a software development company specializing in Facebook apps involving the exchange of virtual money.

Sale price estimates range from $182 million to $228 million (in real money). Supposedly, Google will officially announce the acquisition tomorrow.

This follows last week’s quiet confirmation from Google CEO Eric Schmidt about their partnership with Zynga – clarifying speculative reports in July that Google had “secretly” invested $150 million or so in the enormous play-money poker site.

With a current user base of 28 million budding poker degens at the ready, Zynga is primed for real-money poker with their popular Facebook app Texas HoldEm Poker. You can read more about Zynga’s interest in HR 2267 from Business Insider: JACKPOT FOR ZYNGA: Congress Wants To Legalize Online Gambling.

Conveniently, Zynga uses PayPal for a method of payment (and happens to be PayPal’s biggest client).  This method of payment — turned off years ago for anything related to gambling — could be ideal for a would-be internet gambling licensee under HR 2267 with Barney Frank’s Manager’s Amendment, which prohibits credit card transactions for gambling should his bill become law.

It’s here … the debate we all wanted in 2007, 2008, and 2009 is finally happening. And all signs point to good-for-poker. But we might wanna be careful what we wish for … not sure exactly how it’s gonna play out, but even if the laws we champion get passed post-haste it won’t be like we’re suddenly back in 2006, time-warped to an era when Jamie Gold was the only thing bad about poker. Ahh, the innocence …

Even as online gambling legislation that would effectively make online poker fully legal moves forward, so many different interests will be fighting to have things worded their way …

ABCNews.com gave today’s hearing in the House Ways and Means Committee some significant real estate … and in general the mainstream media has been chirping. Expect the chatter to increase as June 1 approaches. We’ll see if and when online gambling — and specifically poker — become something more than a side-snippet across the multiple channels of CableTalk TV.

Still, with this most recent movement on the McDermott bill — a little 2-hour committee hearing — we got one big step closer to the day when all those 10s of millions of Zynga poker players suddenly begin to play for real money.

This isn’t particularly new — has been out there since August — but it’s the first I noticed … Zynga, the free Texas Hold’em game on Facebook and MySpace and therefore one of the biggest online poker communities out there, apparently has bots growing out the ying-yang. And now, as of about a week ago, after some fixes and revisions, it’s finally working well.

The code for it is publicly available on Google-code:
http://code.google.com/p/zynga-poker-bot/

It’s already had more than 88,000 downloads. If even just 1 percent of those are installed to fruition … well that’s a lot of bots competing for your fake chips and theoretically feeding the imaginary rake.

And here’s a rockin’ video showing exactly how to install it.

Hmm, interesting. More confirmation that bots are a real issue, and will be a major factor in future online poker operations. Also kinda funny to think that bot armies are essentially being trained playing free poker … where they theoretically can eventually work their way up in stakes like a human player who gets better and better.

Kinda-sorta. Zynga’s Texas Hold’em was the most popular game on all of Facebook — more popular than its sister games Mafia Wars, Yoville, and that farming game — which was all fine and dandy until people started hocking play-money chips on eBay.

http://tweet.pkrrd.com/news/posts/zynga-texas-hold-em-maybe-a-little-too-popular

So now they’re apparently in the midst of a Facebook poker crackdown, looking to lock out multi-accounters, for example, and take play-money pushers to court. Conspiracy theorists say it has more to do with black-market undercutting of Zynga’s chip-selling business … but regardless, kinda effed up, not just because of poker, but because of the inevitable hubbub that seems to spring up whenever you see any semblance of a free market on the internet leading to unregulated virtual finance transactions.