No more online poker. All the shit that is going on in the world and with the huge explosion of interest in poker and those bastards think it is a good idea to tack on anti-wagering legislation to some Port Authority Act.
Played my last tourney online last night and it would seem that US citizens are no longer able to play at Party Poker. Same at other sites I guess.
Fuck those fuckin’ fuckers.
pssst, vote Libertarian.
Well, I have been. Doesn’t make a bit of damn difference. I guess it might when I am 90 and can no longer see the monitor and there are more than 5 non-partisan members on the Hill. Just when you think you cannot have any more white hot hatred for a segment of our country’s population and wham, they kick you in the balls.
Hmm. Pokerstars seems to still be up and running.
Party Poker is still running for international players and I can still play for free (Hey, great.) Cannot enter any real money games.
Liquor in the front, poker in the rear.
After a cursory look around and remembering I still had 25 bucks at Stars, you are correct sir. I read in a few places that PokerStars has not yet decided to take the aggressive actions that Party and Paradise and a few others have.
I dunno. It is all still very up in the air as they are legislating air.
Paradise/Party/Pacific kicked out Americans, but they A) Are public and B) Have significant non-poker gambling incomes. Companies that are neither of those appear to be content to stay in the US.
It’ll take a few months for the regulations to get hammered out, but from my reasonably well-informed position I think this is the way it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. ACH and EFTs are uncoded transations, the banks will say it’s too hard for them to police that, and the legislation doesn’t force the banks to do anything the banks say is too hard.
I cannot imagine the amount of work involved in tracing for financial institutions. In addition, the wording puts the bettors in no jeopardy of legal actions, so I guess it is back to Poker Stars for me with a few hundred thousand of my friends.
Full Tilt, Absolute, and Ultimate Bet are all also still active.
Conspiracy hat time: The whole imbroglio was an attempt to kill the stock prices of online gambling companies so that the American gaming conglomerates could get in on the action. I expect to be playing online at Harrahs.com within 3 years.
You can basically put the blame for this straight at the Nevada gambling interests, who don’t want any sort of competition. They tried to keep Native American casinos from opening, and they’re the ones who’ve been against this as well.
Granted that this is stupid legislation, but I just don’t see why this should have much impact on the online gambling availability at all. All it really does is insert the need for a 3rd party into the mix.
Before: I use my credit card to deposit money with the gambling company.
After: I use my credit card to “deposit funds” in an offshore “banking establishment” that offers some perfectly legal services. Said offshore banking establishment then sets up an account with gambling company, allowing deposits and withdrawals into your account. No money crosses the US border at all until/unless you decide to withdraw your deposit, at which point it is a banking transaction.
So, is Neteller offshore? They’re the ones I’ve used to manage cash transactions with PokerStars (transfer from my bank to NETeller - using a bank account that I only use for my poker transactions - and NETeller to Pokerstars, and vice versa.)
All you people who know what you are doing stay away from Poker Stars :)
I’m sad that Party money games are now unaccessible to US folks, since I found them to be the softest games, but I expect Poker Stars to become the largest site for US players now.
The other bit of good news is that Neteller has announced they are still available for US transactions, at least until the regulations get hammered out in the next 270 days.
There’s a stickied thread in the Legislation subforum on the 2+2 Publishing site that has been pretty good about organizing the latest statements from the various sites.
Wait, does this mean that I won’t be able to play on River Belle and other online casinos anymore? I always enjoyed doing that once or twice a month :(. Sometimes I even racked up some decent winnings.
Yep, I agree with both of those observations.
I left Stars for Party as the games were just too full of morons at Party who wanted to give me their money. Also, Stars had substantially fewer folks online. After checking things out today, the online population seems to have increased in the last 2 years or so and I would think, Poker Stars having a big name and all, they would be one of the destinations of choice for many (hopefully the morons).
The problem with Stars is that while it’s raw number of players is decent, it was heavily weighted towards play money guys and people who were playing .01/.02 with the 84 cents they won in a freeroll. Hopefully they bring in some solid mid-range games.
Benny- Most credit cards companies already didn’t do online gambling(fraud risk, chargebacks, etc.). There is some debate about whether they’ll make using intermediates like Neteller illegal. Firepay, who was probably the second biggest ewallet provider for online gambling, has already bowed out of the US market. There are about a half a dozen others, we shall see what the actual regulations say before we knew which will stick around.
Yeah, I tried three different credit cards 3 years ago when I made my first deposit and all were declined. Neteller has always worked like a charm for me. It is based in the Isle of Man or so the site says.
Excerpt from article at Card Player Magazine’s website:
As a matter of fact, Rep. Goodlatte recently appeared on CNBC, where he conceded that because gambling companies themselves are offshore, they aren’t subject to U.S. laws and regulations. The language of the proposed bill only prohibits an online gambling company, based within the borders of the United States, from accepting money from a bank or financial institution.
In essence, Goodlatte’s bill won’t stop Internet gaming; it will just ensure that gaming companies are offshore. Similarly, it won’t stop funding to the sites; rather, it will create additional opportunities for offshore funding.
Our lawmakers are just not paying attention to the poker industry. And even if they paid attention, before a new law is enacted, the online gaming industry will have already created a way around it. It is a matter of the simple principle that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Years ago, the government began attacking credit card companies and online payment services like PayPal, threatening them with Patriot Act charges for doing business with gaming sites. The online gambling industry, which was raking in billions of dollars, was not going to be affected by these tactics. Immediately, offshore third-party vendors such as NETeller became firmly rooted in place to facilitate transactions between gamblers and gaming sites. In other words, making a law affecting U.S. financial institutions is a completely ineffectual way to affect the explosion of the $12 billion Internet gaming industry.
Great, so it’s essentially taking money out of US circulation. They’re outsourcing online gambling.