Playboy Mansion Tournament Qualifier at PlayersOnly.com Sunday Night

Players Can Qualify for the Final Tournament Through Direct Buy-in and Free Roll Tournaments, and both Sit and Go & Multi-Table Cash Satellites

My favourite U.S.-facing online poker room PlayersOnly.com is sending five tournament winners to compete in the All Star Night at the Playboy Mansion celebrity fundraising tournament in Los Angeles June 21st. The top 5 finishers of PO’s Playboy Mansion Party Final this Sunday, June 17th will each receive a pair of VIP tickets to the event.

Hosted by Rodney Peete and attended by over two hundred athletes, celebrities and Playmates, All Star Night At The Playboy Mansion is one of the biggest and most anticipated events of the year. This year’s invitation-only event – at one of the hottest party venues on the planet -- will feature a runway fashion show spotlighting the season’s latest and hottest swimsuit and lingerie designers and a surprise guest musical performance.

Players can get to the Playboy Mansion Party Final by winning a qualifying free roll this Saturday, June 16th at 6 pm ET or by winning one of many daily cash satellites between now and then. Players that want to avoid the crowds at the free roll tables can enter a cash satellite Sit and Go with fewer players. S&G satellite buy-ins range from $2 to $10. There will also be $5 Multi-table tournament satellites running everyday at 12:30 a.m. until the 16th. The complete tournament schedule and structure is posted in the PlayersOnly.com Tournament Lobby.

PlayersOnly.com has donated $2000 to be given to a charity named by the winner of a celebrity poker event held prior to the Party. Proceeds from All Star Night At the Mansion will benefit the Hollyrod Foundation for Help and Hope which is dedicated to providing medical, physical and emotional support to those suffering with debilitating life circumstances especially Parkinson’s Disease.

In addition to the special Playboy Mansion Tournament, PlayersOnly.com’s weekly WSOP satellites will send twelve winners to the WSOP. Their unique low bid auction, where a $12,000 prize package could go for less than a buck, will send another winner to Las Vegas next month. The satellite tournaments and low bid auction conclude June 24th.

Mobile Entertainment Conference Concludes Greedy Phone Companies are the Biggest Barrier to Mobile Gambling

Italy Seen as the Most Progressive Market for Mobile Entertainment and Mobile Gambling

While analysts continue to predict great things for mobile entertainment, delegates at the recent Mobile Entertainment Market (MeM) conference in Monte Carlo were talking as much about barriers to explosive growth as they were about new developments in mobile content. The Mobile Games Manager from Slotland.com, a leading provider of real-money mobile casino games, attended the conference and reports that the concensus in Monaco was that if phone network providers loosened the reigns it would stimulate development and make more entertainment more available to mobile users.

“There’s lots of interesting things happening, especially in progressive markets like Italy,“ said John Lancelet of Slotland.com. “But mobile network providers slow the pace by making data transfer so expensive and by pretty well excluding independent content providers from their portals.”

Data transfer costs are prohibitive and many users are confused about what it will actually cost to download a song or play a game. They are understandably reluctant to buy an MP3 for $1.50 knowing it could cost another $5.00 in data transfer fees to download it, or to play a casino game only to have their winnings gobbled up by phone charges. According to the word on the street at MeM, Italy is the place to go for the most reasonable flat fee offers and South Africa has the best price-per-megabyte fees for downloads.

Phone companies, whose mobile portals are still the only significant source of mobile traffic, have a virtual monopoly on mobile content -- mostly because customers don’t know that they can venture off the phone company’s home page. And unfortunately, since mobile network operators take a much higher percentage of the profits than internet portals, most independent entertainment providers can’t get their product to players this way. However, just because the phone company isn’t offering mobile gambling doesn’t mean players don’t have access to real-money casino games on their mobile. Mobile surfers that leave the phone company’s portal soon find popular independent operators like Slotland.com.

“Generally, mobile content market today is in a similar stage to where the internet was in the late 80s and early 90s when AOL, MSN and similar internet access providers thought that every internet visitor will access the web through their home portals, and no other pages, and every content provider would have to advertise and gain customers through their portals only,” observed Lancelet.

Meanwhile, independent companies like Slotland.com continue to make fun mobile entertainment available. The long-popular slot machine and video poker web site has 5 real-money slots on their WAP site, wap.Slotland.com. The mobile games are tied to Slotland’s famous online progressive jackpots, and players can use their Slotland.com player account on the computer or on the mobile phone.