Kevmath has arrived to play the $10k WSOP main event. He’s currently in the process of trying to collect his pledges, which is clearly a different game than funding a $235 deep stack stab via Twitter. Lets hope his rungood starts today for a final Day 1 buy-in tomorrow … because really, with a new era that doesn’t include Doyle Brunson in the WSOP main event upon us (he’s opting out this year for what I think is only like the third time) don’t we all really need a Kevmath to be properly funded, if not fully backed?

With these kinda arrangements in mind, Pokerati has been working on a basic legal boilerplate to cover typical poker staking arrangements. We’re still working on a few revisions, and customizable blanks to accommodate a variety of backing scenarios. It’s not official yet, and thus not certain to be admissible in court — hey, you get what you pay for — but let me know if you think there’s anything missing or superfluous, especially if you are a practicing attorney in Nevada.

Here is a generic document to solidify your monetary promises in poker, regardless of unfortunate rivers or acts of nature.

Now all we need, I think, is a proper legal disclaimer to make sure yours truly and Pokerati don’t end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit we facilitated.

ALT HED: LegalPokerZoom.com

UPDATE: Tax matters notwithstanding, please add, like the back of my first fake ID, “for entertainment purposes only.”

URL-envy? FS+G apparently wanted to own all things epic, wicked and otherwise on the web.

Lawsuits and bankruptcies are a corporate voyeur’s dream. Legal disclosures offer an upskirt peak at a company’s financial panties. In the case of Federated Sports & Gaming, parent of the troubled Epic Poker League, bankruptcy filings reveal a full-fledged internet domain-name fetish. Literally hundreds of domain names were listed among Federated’s personal property … and in that list, perhaps, lies a bigger story about Epic’s intent.

Companies often buy variants of their own domain names to foil malicious cyber squatters and aid surfers prone to typos and spelling errors. This explains why Federated bought epicpoker.us, epicpoker.xxx, eepicpoker.com and eapicpoker.com along with its primary domain name, epicpoker.com. 

Perhaps proving Federated was more psychic than solvent, epicpokerfail.com and epicpokerfailure.com were among the company’s portfolio of web properties. Of course my favorite was fuckepicpoker.com.

And why epicpokerstars.com but no epicfulltiltpoker.com?

It’s hard to know whether names like epicbridge.com, epiccasino.com, epiccheckers.com and epicsportsbook.com represent Federated’s expansion plans, reveal a business model dependent on online gambling legalization, or was just the results of a bad case of domain-name OCD. 

The list goes on and on — everything from palmspoker.eu, .net, and .co.uk to epicscotch/rum/tequila.com — and you can only wonder what market verticals Epic was thinking about when they locked down ticklemedanny.com.

But particularly curious are dozens of web addresses starting with “wicked” — wickedpoker.com, wickedchess.com, wickedbasketball.com, etc. Since Federated isn’t based in Boston, this presumably has something to do with the talented boys over at Wicked Chops Poker. No wonder their coverage of the #EpicFail has been so … well … I hear they had to take last week off just to search for the near-NSFW pics to pair with their story of who ultimately got who’s what in the end.

Read the relevant bankruptcy court document here.

UPDATE: Wicked Chops apparently has more to say on this matter — and they’re naming names! Not just domain names, but real human ones too.

CZR FTW?
“Poker Poker!”

It feels like we’ve been talking about Caesars going public since before they were Caesars (we have) … but their latest S1/A filing with the SEC suggests not only that CZR really is might be ready to kick it Zynga-style with a big fat IPO … but also that any public offering from the worldwide gambling empire may be in preparation for imminent legalization of US online poker.

While such hefty levels of high finance are still probably a little beyond my ken … you can read the nearly 300 pages of Big Casino corporate speak and decide for yourself. Somewhere in here, I’m pretty sure, is a blueprint for the future of poker and/or online gambling.

At a minimum, I found this snippet on page 7 suggesting that Caesars is getting ready for something big related to online gambling poker:

We believe that additional jurisdictions will legalize online gaming due to consumer demand, a broader understanding of the need to regulate the industry and to generate income through taxes on gaming revenue. As such, we support efforts to regulate the online gaming industry to ensure that consumers are protected. We believe that the potential for online gaming is substantial and believe that we will command, at a minimum, our fair share in any legal jurisdiction. An H2 Gaming Capital study conducted in 2010 projects that the global online gaming market will grow to $36 billion in revenues by 2012. We believe that the largest opportunity in online gaming in the near term is the legalization of online poker in the United States. [emphasis added]

There’s tons more in this document worthy of perusal … some of which I’ve already skimmed. And it doesn’t take much to see how an actual Caesars IPO — not just talk of it — could-well coincide with legalized American online poker hubbub (finally!) reaching critical mass.

Caesars, after all, formerly known as Harrah’s, was a publicly traded company until going private shortly after passage of the UIGEA in 2006. Changed their name to Caesars in November 2010 — the last time they prepped seriously for an IPO (right after their boy Harry Reid won re-election and owed them a favor) only to withdraw plans for a public offering of stock shares right after someone told them the lame-duck online poker Reid bill was just a farce for other political purposes a couple weeks later.

The fully licensed and regulated prop bets available in Nevada sports books for the November Nine are out. And this go-round seems much more sensible than their pilot WSOP wager offerings.

Punters here will now legally be able to bet on:

The Winner
Top Two Finishers

Click here to read official notice of the newly allowed wagers. I’m guessing it didn’t look good for the WSOP to be championing monster prop bets that existed in a “gray area” of Nevada Gaming regulations? Or they were simply pissed that so many of these wagers were going to Bodog? Or they wanted to provide November Niners an ability to hedge their bets. But unlike the case with Pete Rose, it doesn’t necessarily seem like in poker, that betting on one of your opponents will automatically keep you out of the Hall of Fame.

You may or may not have seen the report Barclay’s put out assessing the impact of American DOJ actions vs. Online Poker on the European online gambling sector. Now Moody’s, the venerable global credit rater, has put out their own assessment of how the shutdown of Full Tilt and PokerStars in the US affects high finance and various state economies.

At least I think that’s what they’re saying … but a few things that stood out to me had more to do with what this report reveals about the perception of poker, both as a game and a needle-moving industry, including:

• “Online gambling is no real threat to U.S. land-based casinos.”

So it’s official now. The rest of the world gets what poker people knew in 2006.

More…

So as we thought might-could happen (April, June), Harry Reid (D-NV) is pushing repeal of the UIGEA a way to shore up America’s net bottom-line. I get the feeling the re-empowered Senate Majority Leader was hoping this poker-only proposal could be a last-minute slip-in, a la the UIGEA. But that possibility now seems moot, with the issue officially on the DC radar.

The opposition is rallying the troops to squash any dreams of a poker-industry Christmas present. Check out the letter below, sent to Reid and Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Dave Camp (R-MI), and Lamar Smith (R-TX), the ranking members in the powerful Financial Services, Ways & Means, and Judicial Committees, respectively.

The CC list includes influential Republican online gambling haters Kyl, Boehner, Cantor, and Pence — so you can see how it’s essentially a call to arms to the Republican party to sink this ship before it leaves port … or should we say port security?

Expect gloves to come off in congressional backrooms and in-boxes. The letter points out bipartisan opposition to HR 2267, even though it sailed through its 2010 committee vote with more bipartisan support. What it doesn’t point out — beyond the general issues of more tax revenue while protecting American liberty and supporting the will of the people — is how:

• regulated online poker will create American jobs — 10s of thousands of them
• Ron Paul has repeatedly supported efforts to repeal the UIGEA, a note to Tea Party voters who really wanna believe in sensible government, so they know this isn’t your usual government expansion
• “Poker-only” is probably a safe compromise — that legal American businesses support and stands to have the most immediate positive impact with least possible likelihood of damage (since so many millions of Americans already play)

Camp-Smith Ltr to Reid and McConnell (1)