Monday, May 01, 2006

Aces.com to back Hollywood’s next big poker movie


Aces.com has made a sponsorship offer to the producers of the hottest poker movie since Rounders. The retro Vegas-style casino, poker and sportsbetting site plans to launch the movie with special celebrity events in Los Angeles and Las Vegas this summer. Tons of poker tournaments and contest prizes will mean lots of Aces.com players will join the party!

“Online poker has become such a huge cultural phenomenon,” said Aces.com Manager, Rene Quesada. “This movie really explores the lifestyle and excitement that poker players dream about. It has it all… beautiful women, exotic locations, suspense, cheating, and winning.”

Matt Damon may have revived the genre in Rounders (1998), but Hollywood has been fascinated by poker and poker culture since Hopalong Cassidy saved the day by posing as a newbie poker player in Sunset Trail (1939) and Gene Autry starred in the classic poker murder mystery Loaded Pistols (1948). Warren Beatty also played a sly, cheating, debonair poker player in Kaleidoscope (1966) while in Maverick (1994), Mel Gibson and Jody Foster needed $3000 dollars to enter a winner-takes-all poker tournament. Steve McQueen managed to get into the highest stakes game of his life in perhaps the best poker movie of all time, The Cincinnati Kid (1965).

The movie deal is just the first of many great things to come from the new and improved Aces.com. The site is part of Sportingbet Plc – the biggest online gambling company in the world – and has long been popular with Vegas gamblers.

“Most of our players first got into casino games, poker and sports betting at hotels on the Vegas strip,” said Quesada about typical Aces.com players. “Something like 65% tells us that they still make one or more trips to Las Vegas every year, but 100% enjoy having everything that Vegas has to offer right on their home computer.”