Poker Stars has just announced that it will be sponsoring the Federación Española de Baloncesto (FEB), otherwise known as the Spanish Basketball Federation for at least one year’s time.

As part of its sponsorship, Poker Stars will start offering satellite tournaments that award as their top prizes tickets to various Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB) games, including the 2010 FIBA World Championship that begins August 28 in Turkey where Spain’s basketball team, which currently holds the 3rd place ranking beneath the U.S. and Argentina, will face off against those top rivals as well as Canada, France, Lebanon, Lithuania and New Zealand, the five other teams with whom the Spanish team shares Group D.

Among the satellite tournaments awarding tickets to watch key FEB basketball games will be plenty of freeroll tournaments.

PokerStars sponsors many sporting events and hosts satellites awarding tickets to events across various sports. There are also many individual athletes on Team PokerStars, including tennis star Gaël Monfils, football goalkeeper Gianluigi ‘Gigi’ Buffon, field hockey legend Fatima Moreira de Melo, and rugby player Sebastian Chabal.

Most mobile phones these days already have the internet built in. So all PokerStars, or any other poker site, has to do is tweak their software to make it viable (read: playable) on a 3.5″ screen, or smaller. And the way that PokerStars is doing this is by purchasing its very own mobile software development firm.

They won’t say how much they paid for Cecure Gaming, originally a Cavendish Corporate Finance property, but one thing is for sure. It is PokerStars’ latest sally in an ongoing effort to remain at the head of the pack. Expect PokerStars mobile to set the trend for mobile online poker now.

If you want to get a jump on the move to the mobile platform you can check out the existing software by using a Poker Stars Promo Code or a Marketing Code for PokerStars.

Season 6 of the EPT is already underway, but the schedule for the second half was only just released. It has the next event on the EPT schedule coming November 17 to Portugal.

Season 3 of the LAPT starts next, with LAPT Costa Rica coming up on November 19 in San Jose. Other stops on LAPT 3 are Uruguay, Chile, and the Grand Final in Argentina.

Season 1 of the UK & Ireland Poker Tour starts December 11 with UKIPT Galway, better known as the Irish Poker Championship. The other events in this first-ever UKIPT will be held in Manchester, Coventry, Nottingham, Killarney, Brighton, Scotland, and Dublin.

Satellites for the first stops on each of these tours are going now at PokerStars.

While Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars (the two to beat, if you ask most folks) are offering a respectable $650 and $600 match, respectively, two sites have upped the ante even further.

PKR, the one-of-a-kind 3D poker site, has a new $800 welcome bonus maximum and William Hill Poker has a £400 max.

Some sites, by the by, offer no deposit bonuses, albeit of much smaller amounts, but nonetheless something-for-nothing. One of the best casino signup bonus running right now is at Ladbrokes as is for £25.  You can find other bonuses by doing an online poker search here.

This is not the first time PokerStars broke one of its own Guinness World Records Book records, having a set another bar a level higher just a few months ago in July when it attracted 65,000 players to a single multi-table online poker tournament at once, beating its own previous record for “Largest Online Poker Tournament.” On that same July day, Full Tilt Poker tried to thwart PokerStars‘ new record attempt by attempting one of its own, but failed.

PokerStars, which launched in 2001, now claims to have more than 27 million registered players and has had the honor of dealing out over 33 billion online poker hands.