BY TOM SOMACH

Internet gambling website Bodog has changed its web address.

Again.

The Antigua-based site, which offers online poker, online casino games and online sports betting, now has its third different web address in the last month.

The latest web address for Bodog is www.bodoglife.com.

For years, Bodog had the web address www.bodog.com, but last month changed it to www.newbodog.com.

Now it’s been changed again, to www.bodoglife.com, and this time the company says the change is final.

If you go to www.newbodog.com, an announcement from Bodog owner Calvin Ayre reads:

“A few weeks ago we temporarily released newbodog.com, but in an effort to move to a more permanent home we announced bodoglife.com. Now we are going to turn newbodog.com off over the next few days and I wanted to make sure you updated your bookmarks to www.bodoglife.com. Although the Bodog address is changing for good, this is the bottom line: At Bodog, it’s business as usual. Same great site, just a new web address. This is Bodog. This is the life. Play hard. Calvin.”

Bodog had to give up its longtime www.bodog.com addy after being sued and losing a court case in the U.S. over the ownership of that web address.

The case was complicated, but in a nutshell, Bodog lost the case when Ayre failed to show up in court to defend himself and his company against the lawsuit.

Ayre didn’t show up, according to published reports about the case, because he was afraid of coming to the U.S. for fear of being arrested for running an illegal Internet gambling operation, in violation of U.S. anti-online gambling laws.

In the last year, U.S. authorities have arrested foreign executives from two other online gambling companies when they entered the U.S.–David Carruthers of Bet on Sports and Peter Dicks of Sportingbet.

Bodog is expected to lose untold millions of dollars worth of business in the coming months, as gamblers who log onto the old web address, www.bodog.com, do not get redirected to the new web address.

Instead, www.bodog.com is now a dead link, offering only that the link is “unknown”=9D and leading gamblers to likely believe that Bodog has gone out of business.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)