With online poker taking a series of knock-backs in the States, Canada is now emerging as the new face of online poker in the post-noughties period. The new owner of Poker.ca thinks he has the answer: that Canada is taking a whole new approach to poker as a business. They are choosing to listen to gamblers and work alongside them, giving them what they want rather than trying to dictate what they need. He also stated that Canadians love staying well-informed, especially about topics they feel deeply for. Canada boasts some of the world’s finest brick and mortar Casinos, as well as being home to some of the best poker pros on the planet. Online poker is undergoing a period of very rapid evolution, and it seems Canada is fully embracing that evolution.

The new manager of Poker.ca, one of Canada’s biggest supporters regarding poker’s future in the country, has chosen to keep his identity a secret. He recently purchased his new website for a hefty $400,000, and immediately set about giving it a facelift. The new interface boasts a news-stream (updated many times daily) as well as poker info, deals and offers. Although not much is known about his identity, it can be confirmed that the owner is a professional player himself. He plans to use his time at the felt, and his lucrative set of associations, to the full benefit of his new website. It seems Canada is setting a standard for online poker that the rest of the world will be hard-pressed to follow.

If you’ve played online poker at all, you know that the race to get new players and keep them is fierce and many poker rooms go above and beyond in their efforts. One such poker room that leads the pack in rewarding players is UltimateBet. As part of the CEREUS poker network, the sheer size of the poker room and number of players involved in games means that it’s able to offer hyper-competitive sign-up, reload, and referral bonuses to players who are interested in real-money poker games.
When you first sign up to play at UltimateBet’s cash tables, the poker room offers you a 111% bonus, one that’s far and above most of the competition’s, and certainly the highest average we’ve seen a poker room offer to its players. While there are some restrictions in how quickly you can get your money from UB (how else would they make sure players stuck around,) the short version is that this is the best online poker bonus that we’ve found. Unlike a lot of poker rooms, UB has put the terms for their sign-up bonus on their website and spelled things out in plain English, even explaining how you can more quickly get your bonus.
In addition to this big first-time bonus, UltimateBet also offers regular reload bonuses. The percentage on these varies wildly, but since it’s basically free money, we can’t complain too much. Most of the time, it’s between 20-50%, but we’ve seen days where the bonus offered was 80% or more! If you’re a great player like Billy Kopp, you probably won’t need it, but it’s nice for the rest of us to have the ability to get more for not being the best at the game…yet.
Finally, UltimateBet’s referral program is the most aggressive out there. They reward both the player who refers someone and their referred player with a nice cash bump! If you’re a real money player at UB, you get $75 for the player you refer and they get $50 for being referred! It’s a great way to build up your bankroll and make sure you have more friends to play poker with online.
Overall, UltimateBet’s bonuses and referral dollars are a cut above the competition. Throw in the better-than-average software that works on the Mac and PC and a huge player base, you’re looking at a great deal for players of all types.