Fitting or ironic, take your pick, but the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada is where a group of marketing experts and lawyers got together so that they could advise online poker operators how to promote their Internet gambling sites. Of course, online gambling is illegal in the United States and Nevada is no exception, but that didn’t stop Chief Executive Officer of Bodog.com, Calvin Ayre, from hosting the gathering. Bodog.com is one of the largest sports betting sites on the Internet and has recently launched an online poker room in order to capitalize on the Internet poker boom.

Ayre, a Canadian whose site is based in Costa Rica, believes Las Vegas is an appropriate location for such a conference and, in a statement about the relationship between Las Vegas and online gambling sites said: “The progressive casinos ... acknowledge the industry for what it is…. We are a large feeder system for the casinos and Las Vegas is the center of this space.”

Not by coincidence, the conference began just one day before the start of the championship event of the World Series of Poker. The World Series of Poker, hosted at the Rio convention center, is the largest poker tournament in the world and is referred to by some in the poker world as the Super Bowl of poker.

The event itself is divided up into three groups over three days so that they can all fit into the Rio’s ballroom. Approximately 6000 players registered to play at the 200 poker tables awaiting them in the ballroom with 2000 of those players facing off the first day of the tournament. The first prize winner at the tournament will take home a jackpot of seven million dollars and runner-ups will receive one million dollar prizes.

According to Jeff Shulman, a poker player and publisher of Card Player Magazine in Las Vegas, as many as one third of the entrants to the final tournament will have won or obtained their seats in one way or another through online poker sites such as Bodog.com.

Shulman, who will be playing at the tournament himself, said that “casinos know how important online sites are”.

The original conference hosted by Bodog.com was more of an insider party for sports handicappers three years back but it has since become the largest promotional activity for the online gambling industry around. Ayre, unlike most of the investors and operators of online gambling sites, doesn’t hide from the spotlight either, saying that he’s not afraid of the US ban on Internet gambling. "We don't block bets from Nevada but we don't go out of our way to tap people in Nevada," he said. "We don't do business in Nevada. And we're not going to police jurisdictions all over the world. That's not our responsibility," Ayre said.