Where has the much hyped PokerTribe.com website gone to and how is the new Grey Snow Poker related to it? Who is powering the GreySnow Poker software? Is Fred Khalilian completely out of the picture?
These are just some questions that people are asking about the new poker site that has just mushroomed in the last few days called Grey Snow Poker.
What we do know about the new poker site so far is that it has been launched by the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma. This is the same tribe that launched the controversial PokerTribe.com website that offered free to play games and promised to start offering real money games but never made good on that promise.
The fact that PokerTribe.com has disappeared does not come as a major surprise.
To be fair, PokerTribe was headed in that direction for so long, having constantly missed its “live” deadlines. The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma partnered with Fred Khalilian’s Universal Entertainment Group (UEG) to launch PokerTribe.com and landed in a lot of controversy due to the fact that UEG had earlier launched PokerTribes.com on behalf of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.
The tribes sued UEG for $9.4 million after their international real-money gaming plans failed to materialize but lost the case.
Grey Snow Poker Is Replacement Site
The tribe has now launched a new poker site called Grey Snow Poker. This is clearly a replacement online poker site for the tribe and its name is probably the only thing that’s new behind this latest venture. The new name is derived from the tribe’s name in its native language Baxoje (Bah Kho-je), which is known as People of the Grey Snow.
Many believe that the rebranding has to do with the fact that the previous PokerTribe domain was already mired with so many controversies and lawsuits, making it harder for the Iowa tribe to successfully get the license from the Isle of Man. But essentially, everyone one on board the new Grey Snow Poker website are the same people behind the older PokerTribe.com website. For one, the licensee of the site is Ioway Internet Gaming Enterprises, an Isle of Man company that was also associated with the previous PokerTribe website.
There are also indications that despite Grey Snow Poker’s claims that it uses its “own internal software” to run the games on its site, it’s still the old software provided by Monster, Inc., the company that went on to acquire.
In a statement, Isle of Man’s gaming regulators said,
Unfortunately we cannot disclose third-party agreements of our licenced operators. However, if you contact the licence holder directly, they may be happy to give you this information. We can however confirm that the software has been tested to a sufficient standard
