Google announced today it launched the first rake-free online poker room, GooglePoker. Regular online poker rooms charge a small percentage of the pot, commonly known as rake, as a fee for hosting the game, but the new Google branded poker room is completely free, as revenues will be generated by small text advertisements (AdSense) shown along the right side of the poker table.
Industry analysts expect GooglePoker to become the new market leader in online poker in only six months from now, because existing online poker rooms like PartyPoker and PokerStars, are simply not able to offer their product for free like GooglePoker, and need to charge their customers rake to survive.
Google customers can enter the new poker room using the same logon info they are using for other Google services, like GMail or Google Calendar. Deposits can be made through the payment processing facility Google is already using for it's Google Video and Google Base services.
Fortunately for PartyPoker and PokerStars and all other rake-based poker rooms the scenario described above is completely fictitious, and probably never will become a reality due to legal constraints, particularly in the US.
However it is true that Google entered the poker market today with the addition of two Google-branded poker products to their online store: the Google poker set and the Google milk chocolate poker chips.
The Google poker set is a Burton Morris poker set for Texas Holdem, with a tabletop case, 78 poker chips, two decks of cards and five dice. It comes with a gift box embossed with the Google logo.
The Google milk chocolate poker chips are sold individually for $0.75 a piece. In the accompanying text Google admits it loves chocolate and is also known to play a game of poker or two. "Why not combine the two" the add continues.
It's funny that Google admits to play poker occasionally because they are not allowing online poker advertisements into their AdWords program. Google's slogan is "do no evil", so can we now safely conclude that playing poker online is not as evil as some US senators would like us to believe it is?