Back in the early poker-boom days, it became well-known around higher stakes circles in Dallas that a few of the Mavericks liked to play Texas Hold’em. Thus it was no surprise, back in ’06, when Mark Cuban and the Mavs did business with PokerStars.com. This was before the UIGEA, mind you … so the poker industry as we know knew it was still taking shape. But already the standard was becoming that dot-net was acceptable to advertise, dot-com was not. (The Feds had just seized a few million dollars from the Discovery Channel network, parent to the Travel Channel, for ill-gotten ad revenues from Paradise Poker … dot com.) Thus, though few recognized it at the time, it was kinda a big deal when Cuban was willing to *go rogue* and use his NBA basketball team to advertise the web domain with higher affiliate conversion rates.

(I seem to recall that deal lasted only a few months, if not less; not confirmed though.)

Anyhow, a little flashback to a more innocent era … reminding us where we (as in poker) were just five years ago. Nolan Dalla, then a representative for PokerStars, sat down to explain the difference between dot-com and dot-net, long before poker sites would learn the true power of a dot-gov. You’ll have to excuse the added music … I was still learning how podcasts worked at the time. And poker for that matter:

Jason Terry began dreaming of Championship rings and WSOP bracelets thanks to PokerStars.com.

From Pokerati, May 2006 (Maverick Poker, Take 2)
[audio:https://pokerati.com/podcast/dotcomdotnet2.mp3]
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OK, so the Mavericks are in the playoffs. And not only do the Mavs kick ass … but also they love poker. You’ll notice plenty of advertising and sponsorial relationships between the team and online poker sites. But what you may or may not notice is that while ESPN, Fox Sports, GSN, Travel Channel, et al. run ads for nameyourpokersite.NET … the Mavs advertise the previously declared illegal (by the U.S. Justice Dept.) dot-COM varieties.

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