$1000 can go a long way if you use it correctly. Here’s what NOT to do with it first:
1- Don’t buy bulk traffic. It sucks.
2- Don’t buy SEO services. Anyone who’d do a decent job of SEO consulting for this industry is either charging more than you can afford, or they’re busy SEO’ing their own sites so they can make a ton of money.
3- Don’t waste it on a bunch of low-quality PPC search engines. You can find some older discussions of which PPC engines are real dogs in the forums here if you search for them.
Here are some ideas of things you CAN do with $1000:
1- Buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. You’ll have money left over, and you’ll learn a lot that can make you successful online in ANY industry.
2- Planet Ocean’s SEO Book is good too. It’s titled The Unfair Advantage.
3- There are softwares that can help improve your SEO efforts that you can spend money on.
4- You could pay someone to write a really groundbreaking ebook about online gambling and give it away. The resulting exposure should get you some presss and backlinks.
5- You could buy lots of really strange stuff on eBay and tell the press that it’s newsworthy that you’re buying the stuff. You’ll get backlinks and media attention. (Works for Golden Palace.)
6- Directory submissions. Stay away from crappy directories that will link to anyone who pays a fee though.
Get creative. Brainstorm. Make a list of ideas of what you can do with a $1000 advertising budget. Spend $20 of it on a case of beer and get some buddies to help brainstorm with you.