Americas Cardroom, the world's largest grey-market poker site, is no more. That's because it announced its rebranding today as ACR Poker, which includes the existing selection of games but is presenting them on an all-new software platform.
ACR, which has been around for 21 years, promises its new platform will provide players with enhanced useability and improved navigation features. The site, which remains the flagship offering of the Winning Poker Network, is doing away with the clunky pop-up windows and other components that, in ACR's words, interrupted the user experience.
Both the tourney and cash-game sides of ACR Poker received significant upgrades in a client update made available today in conjunction with the rebranding. On the tourney side of the poker client, ACR has introduced detachable widgets, improved navigation and search options, and other extras.
The tournament lobby improvements include the following, per ACR:
- Improved navigation for multi-day events.
- Easier-to-pin events, making it easier to see the tournaments players are registered for.
- Improved sorting, searching, and filtering functionality.
- Final-table streaming indicators to easily see which tournaments are available to watch the action.
The cash-game side of ACR's poker platform has received a broad facelift as well, including new rules along with the improvements and enhancements:
- Players may only start one table at a time.
- A new table cannot be created while an empty seat is available in that same cash-game group.
- If a cash-game group has more than one table with one person sitting alone, the most recently created table will be closed.
- Waiting lists for specific tables are no longer available. Instead, players can choose between these options:
- Easy access to a cash table with an open seat via a "Join" button for each open table.
- A "Hide full tables" button.
- A waiting list that functions much like live cardrooms, in that it seats players at the first table with an open seat.
The new ACR Poker has published a software tutorial on its YouTube channel to help players come up to speed on the new software:
It's more common than one might think for an online-poker room to rebrand itself, and examples abound over the game's two-decades-plus existence online. One of the first online rooms, Pacific Poker, later reverted to its corporate name and became 888Poker. The original Bodog Poker went through multiple name changes, first becoming Bovada and then splitting into various entities including Ignition Casino and a return of the Bodog name.
One of the most curious rebranding tales involved the original Poker.com site, which existed on a leased domain -- yes, Poker.com. When that leasing deal expired, the flagship site was rebranded as Carbon Poker and the network was renamed as the Merge Network. These are far from the only such rebranding examples.
