Leading online poker site UltimateBet finds a new home at UB.com

Tuesday signified a landmark day in the online poker industry, as Ultimate Bet, a USA-facing site on the CEREUS Poker Network, rebranded itself UB.com. The two-letter acronym has been the site’s nickname since its launch 10 years ago.

“Raise, Stack, Own” becomes the new mantra of UB.com, which retains the gold color theme of the old Ultimate Bet, but adds a baby blue hue as well. “Celebrity Apprentice” runner-up Annie Duke, 11-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth, and PokerRoad CEO Joe Sebok become the front men of the new site, which can be accessed by visiting UB.com or UltimateBet.com. A software update went live this morning and players’ user names and passwords will remain the same as they were prior to the UB.com transition.

UB and its sister site, Absolute Poker, are both owned by Tokwiro, whose CEO, Paul Leggett, commented in a press release, “The launch of UB.com represents a turning point for our company. We have assembled a great group of professionals who are passionate about poker to build the UB brand. Our goal is to create products and services that poker players really want. We are trying to listen very carefully to both our players and the poker community to help us achieve this goal.”

New lobby filters made their debut on Tuesday as part of the software update to UB.com. Omaha tables can now be filtered, making finding a game even simpler. In addition, the new update added color-coded icons to the tournament and ring game lobbies. In the former, special designations are given for Turbo, Ultra Turbo, Rebuy, Deep Stack, Bounty, Six-Max, Four-Max, and Heads-Up formats. In cash games, color-coded icons exist for Turbo, Jackpot, 7-2, Deep Stack, 50 Minimum Big Blind, and Ante tables on the virtual felts of UB.com. At the bottom of the lobby, a horizontal legend reminds users of what the new icons signify.

The lobby takes on a sleek yellow feel and the total update when we ran Ultimate Bet’s Mac version was 8,600 KB, which took about two minutes to download. The upper left corner of the lobby features the sleek UB.com black and yellow logo with the player and table counts given right underneath it written in white block lettering. The Mac version, which was rolled out in September along with an Instant Play option, still is limited to a maximum of four open tables. The Instant Play version requires the latest version of Java to be installed on the Mac or Windows device.

The new cash game filters include the maximum number of players, table stack sizes, and table type. In addition, you can specify the number of players per flop and the number of players per table to ensure that only desired tables come up in the search. A total of 30 new tournaments featuring $1 million in guaranteed prize money have been introduced as part of a gradual overhaul, quickly establishing the USA-friendly CEREUS Network as one of the top around.

Hellmuth, who has long served as the face of the popular online poker site, talked about the movement from Ultimate Bet to UB.com: “In the ten years since I have been involved with the UB brand, I have never been prouder to represent the company as much as I am right now. We have great people captaining the ship, we have a great vibe, and some serious swagger. I look forward to the day when we are the largest poker site on the planet.”

According to PokerScout.com, which keeps tabs on online poker room traffic, the CEREUS Network is the sixth largest worldwide with a seven-day running average of 2,750 real money ring game players, about one-tenth of the traffic of PokerStars, the largest site in the industry. UB.com made waves in late October by changing its raise logic and launching synchronized breaks in its larger tournaments at 55 minutes past each hour, in line with the precedents set by PokerStars and Full Tilt.