The future of US online poker
Just a brief update one year after this article was written: not much has changed really, so most of it is still current news.
As of June 2011 the US online poker landscape looks like a battle field with very few survivors. Indeed if you like to play poker online and you live in the United States, very few choices are currently available to you for real money games.
In fact Cake Poker seems to be pretty much the only way to play poker online currently. Carbon Poker and Bodog poker just announced that they are not welcoming US players for the near term. Doyles’ Room and True Poker were shut down by the FBI 2 weeks ago. PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UB Poker and Absolute Poker were banished from the US market 2 months ago when the Department of Justice seized their .com domains (later released). And of course 5 years ago after the implementation of infamous UIGEA the major rooms of the time already left, such as 888poker, Party Poker and Pacific Poker to name a few.
This witch hunting crusade has no goal other then satisfying the bigots in the USA as well as the ego of a few officials in the DOJ who have a very ambitious career plan. Remember that Rudy Guliani started his ascension to political prominence by conducting a similar crusade about some of the investments bankers on Wall Street. And this certainly led him a long way as he was a Republican presidential candidate at some point. So here we go again, if the DOJ can indict some of these online poker rooms and collect a few billion dollars in fees in the process, what a victory will it be for the district attorneys at the top of this process.
But this is a story very unlike the one of Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken who robbed the public of hundreds of millions of dollars. Here the DOJ is simply trying to restrict the freedom of millions of online poker players who love the game of poker and love to play it on the Internet. They are using a technicality regarding deposit and withdrawal processes to indict and close these businesses, adding to unemployment while doing so.
Let’s just hope that this fiasco leads to a clean online gambling regulation in the near term so that the major players are allowed to offer the game to everyone who decides to enjoy his favorite hobby.