At the end of December, the Department of Justice changed its stance on the Wire Act of 1961 and said that it only applies to sports betting, which means the online gambling and online poker field is wide open. Now, to understand some of what we’re seeing on ABC News and other news media - the DOJ’s reversal didn’t make online gambling legal in the United States. They just made it not already illegal on a Federal level. That means that states can pass online gambling legislation without violating federal law. And many of them are already on their way to doing so, particularly where online poker is concerned. Nevada is already issuing licenses for online poker. New York is looking into it. Iowa wants a bill that will combine their poker players with other states so they have someone to play against.
So, the country or at least parts of it are going to embrace online gambling. The question becomes — what is Congress up to. Well, not much yet. The problem congress may be facing is that the states are showing they can act far more quickly on issues than congress can. But now Harry Reid is stepping forward to say that we can’t have a bunch of local gambling laws across the US and need to look to federal legislation to bring in the top online gambling operators. I have to agree with him. Now, I live in Florida which is probably likely to have online poker at some point. Probably a point that occurs somewhere in time after the Hard Rock says “hey, we could run an online poker site.” And Florida has a secret resource when it comes to poker players — retirees. It’ll be like the senior event at the WSOP every day down here, but at least there will be people to play against. (Iowa has corn. Corn has not proven to be a very active poker player.)
So Harry Reid is right — without federal legislation, the US won’t be a competitive environment for the top casinos and online poker rooms. And I want to play with the best. Don’t you?
Yes, I’ve been on vacation over the holidays, so I’m just now getting back to the blog. But the good news is that we’ve had a big change for the better in US gambling law while I’ve been on vacation. This has convinced me that I should go on vacation more often to see if more things improve while I’m not here to write about them. So, here’s what happened and what may happen.
Just before Christmas, the Department of Justice sat down and realized that they hadn’t bought the Poker Players Alliance a gift and had no idea what to get them. You know the feeling. It’s one of those pre-Christmas days that sends you running to Yahoo! For gift suggestions. And then someone said “hey, what if we just find a way to change US gambling laws before Christmas.”
Okay, I’m making that up. At least I think I am because it’s no odder than what really happened – the US DOJ changed the gambling laws before Christmas. Actually, they reinterpreted the views of the gambling laws and decided that the Wire Act of 1961 only applied to sports betting not online casinos. It’s just a bit of a change in what the phrase “sports events and contests” means. They’ve decided – sports event and sports contests, leaving online casinos and online poker out of the equation.
So, what does this mean for 2012? Well, people are cautioning that it doesn’t mean that online gambling and online poker are automatically legal everywhere. But it does open the door for states to create their own laws around online gambling because there currently isn’t a federal law against it. Keep in mind the UIGEA didn’t make gambling illegal. It only called for enforcement against illegal gambling.
So, for 2012, Nevada is already poised to begin offering online poker. New York and New Jersey both could potentially offer online poker by the end of the year. California wants to put the state lottery online but says they have no immediate plans for poker. Though that may change depending on the competition.
Keep in mind that all this legislation is likely to come in a rush because the DOJ stance could be overturned if the Democrats lose the White House. So, in November head to the polls. I can’t tell you how to vote but I can tell you that it can make a difference.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that online poker has fallen under scrutiny these days. Much of it seems to relate back the April 15th Black Friday Poker Shutdown where the FBI seized the domain names and bank accounts of 4 online poker rooms. The court cases are being worked through but industry insiders are scrutinizing what has happened to the poker rooms involved and what went wrong after the shut downs happened.
The big news out there is Full Tilt Poker. This is probably to be expected since it is the one site that has caused the most concern over its collapse. What’s interesting is that both Cereus Network sites – Absolute Poker and UB.com failed after the April 15th Black Friday Poker Shutdown in the US but the screaming over those has faded. It’s almost as if the poker industry has agreed that somehow they always thought something wasn’t right over at the Cereus Network but everyone thought Full Tilt was doing well. The problem is that no one was checking to make sure they really were doing well.
Full Tilt’s main problem stems from the mixing of money in player accounts with operating funds. This meant that when things went bad, the money they owed players was tied up and they couldn’t pay them back. Which eventually caused the Alderney Gaming Control Commission to suspend their license. Now, it seems that what took the AGCC so long to act was that they were relying on reports from Full Tilt Poker to explain their own finances. Sort of like asking the kid if he did his homework and letting him fill out his own report card.
So now the review has moved from the poker rooms to the review of the people who should be reviewing the poker room. In other words, the poker world may become as smart as the average Mom. Don’t ask the kid if the room is clean. Go and check.
This may not strike some as a gambling story, but trust me it is. And I’ve verified it on News sites, including the WSJ. Even Fox News has the story, so I know it has to be true. (Part of that sentence is a joke.) But longtime Democrat Barney Frank from Massachusetts has let it be known that he will retire rather than seek reelection in 2012. Frank is a sometimes crotchety advocate for many causes dear to online gamblers as well as many liberal voters. Inside the gambling community, he’s known for his efforts to pass legislation that would allow secure online gambling in the United States. Outside the gambling community, he’s probably best known for being the first openly gay member of Congress. And he was once reprimanded by Congress for encounters with a male prostitute. Oh, and there was that one time he told a woman arguing with him about President Obama’s health care plan that he’d rather argue with a dining room table. Bless the people of Massachusetts because none of these things kept him from being reelected every year.
So, what will happen in the gambling scene with Frank retiring? Well, folks now is your chance to decide that. We have elections coming up. Take a look at the folks running and ask yourself what their views on online gambling really are. Look at the other issues too. After all, we need jobs if we want to keep earning money to gamble. Now, I’m not going to tell you how to vote because that’s your decision. But just remember, what happens afterwards is in your hands. So at least get out there and actually vote.
Now, don’t get excited and go sign up for an account because cheating sounds like a good way to win at a casino. Do you really think any online casino is going to run software that allows the player to cheat? Of course not. A glitch like that would be found and fixed immediately. In fact, players have found that casinos are quick to “fix” problems even when they make a mistake by offering a promotional offer that’s a little too good, as one casino did when they started suspending accounts after player took advantage of a really low play through offer on a bonus offer.
But in this case, the software company in question BLR Technologies, apparently released a software platform for online casinos that would allow the casinos to change the odds of a win based on the player’s wager. So, if a player was betting really big at blackjack, the casino could make it harder for him to win while still letting players with lower wagers win according to the actual odds. Or maybe they’d make it easier for lower bets to win.
Now, to see how this might affect players, imagine if you started playing blackjack on the software with low bets and noticed you seemed to do really well at blackjack. So, you start betting more and suddenly you hit a losing streak. But that happens, doesn’t it. Then the casino has more of your money than it should before you stop playing and give up.
Now, so far no one seems to have evidence that the casinos were cheating, though one player has obtained a refund from 5Dimes.com, one of the casinos that ran BLR Technologies software. Another casino World Wide Wagering has ceased using the software and a third Legend Sports says that they have invested in new RNG software to ensure that their casino is fair.
Now, I don’t have any information on whether this was an accidental software glitch or something planned. I’d expect to find out it was unintentional but I’ll be checking the news for online casino updates.
The November Nine have played and the bracelet has been awarded in the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event. And the winner is – Pius Heinz, a 22 year old college student from Germany. Heinz is the fourth player under 25 to win the WSOP in as many years. And to give you an idea of how young 22 years old is in WSOP terms – the tournament takes place in Las Vegas where you have to be 21 to play. So the only reason the 18 and 19 year olds aren’t tearing up the tournament is because they aren’t allowed to play yet.
But there’s another factor besides youth at play here. It’s the internet. When many of the former top names in poker began playing the World Wide Web was just a place where nerds and librarians hung out. Poker was played in casinos, card rooms, smoky backrooms, and your neighbor’s garage. Now poker is played on the internet. Okay, still in those other places. But the young players are getting more practice done in a couple of months than players used to get in a year or more and that’s because of online poker.
Online poker means a game is always available and with a wide choice of games. It means that a skilled player can actually play more than one table and one hand at a time. It means they learn fast. And it means you can learn about your opponent long before you meet him in a real world tournament because you’ll go up against him online. And right now it means that the Americans are falling behind in the game.
Why? Because we don’t have strong online poker regulations in the US and since we chased out PokerStars and Full Tilt, we don’t even have a major international online room to play at. This means that US poker players are playing against the top names they’ll be up against in a tournament. Poker it seems in no longer America’s game. We’ll have to hand that title over to the kids from the EU or perhaps — change the regulations at home?
Quick – who sings the song “The Gambler”? You know, the song where you have to “know when to hold them, know when to fold them.” If you said Kenny Rogers, you know your classic country songs better than the lawyers working for the U.S. Government. It seems that in their work around the indictment of a poker payment processor, the US persecutors referenced “Willie Nelson’s classic poker song about knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them.” The big problem there — while Willie Nelson would probably agree with the philosophy behind the lyrics, the song is sung by Kenny Rogers.
Now, the song was referenced in a 51 page document filed in response to a pre-trial motion by a payment processor that poker is a game of skill. So, even though the lawyers got the song writer wrong, they will have to actually go to court over whether online poker counts as gambling or a game of skill, like chess. Poker is like chess? Well, actually, the International Federation of Poker was accepted into the International Mind Sports Association back in April of 2010, which means that poker is actually eligible as an Olympic sport.
But the US legal regulations around online poker have been big news in the country after the 2011 Black Friday Poker Shut Down of April 2011 (yeah, so a year after it was declared a sport). The result of the shutdown has been a number of professional US poker players heading north to play at Canadian Online Casinos. But now the US attorney’s will have to go to court and prove that poker isn’t a game of skill.
This isn’t bad news in the poker world as much as it’s just old news in the poker world. We’ve all known for months now that Absolute Poker and UB.com weren’t going to survive for much longer. The two sister poker rooms have been in a death spiral since the Black Friday Poker Shutdown by the US Department of Justice back on April 15th, 2011. That was the day that the FBI seized the bank accounts and domain names of four online poker rooms operating in the US. Keep in mind that these weren’t the only online poker rooms operating in the country and that there are still online games taking place every day. But these were the poker rooms where the FBI felt they had ample evidence of money laundering. Which really seems to come down to the poker rooms labeling poker payments as dog food and party trinkets.
Absolute Poker and UB.com were the first poker rooms to show signs of crashing big time after being forced out of the US market. The poker rooms, which are both owned by Blanca Games, made no effort to pay out on players’ accounts. And oddly, they seemed to make no effort to prevent US players from accessing and playing on their accounts, something that both PokerStars and Full Tilt did immediately. Then rumors started about Blanca Games going bankrupt. The problem with all this is that a bad reputation for payouts can be the death of a poker room since players aren’t likely to put money into an account if they don’t think they can get it back out. So even non-US players soon went elsewhere. Reports are that traffic on the sites dropped to fewer than 30 players a day.
Now, the news seems to be that Blanca Games is going to liquidate any assets it still has in an attempt to pay out money owed to players. No news yet on what will happen after that. We’ll wait and see. Maybe this will even make it to Fox News.
Donald Trump hasn’t made the big media news sites like CNN News since his aborted run for president, but he’s back in the news on the gambling blogs. Ah, Donald Trump, how we’ve missed you and your hair. And sometimes you’re vagueness about how you’ll accomplish your lofty goals. Trump has now announced that he’s jumping into the online casino debate, at least the one in the state of New Jersey. Now, this shouldn’t be too surprising since The Donald owns property in Atlantic City, including the Taj Mahal, which means that Trump is being affected by the Atlantic City Slump.
Now, last year there was an attempt to legalize online gambling in the state of New Jersey with the stipulation that to operate in the state, an online casino would have to be run out of an established Atlantic City location. The hope was that by legalizing online gambling this way, the state would both raise revenue for its coffers and give a boost to those casinos that decided to offer online games. But the bill was vetoed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Some believe that Christie’s action was influenced by the National Football league. Others feel the motivation for the vetoed may be more closely tied to part politics since Christie is a Republican and appeals to a conservative base.
But now that Donald Trump has discovered that even as a Republican, he isn’t likely to be elected POTUS, he’s put his political aspirations behind him and is focusing back on the business and gambling world. Which, if he can influence the decision to bring online gambling to Atlantic City will make him a hero to many.
With all the debate that takes place around the subject of online gaming and mobile gaming, which we know will be responsible for the downfall of mankind, it’s interesting to watch developments in Nevada. Now there are a couple of reasons I check out Nevada gambling and politics – they’ve been intertwined for decades. We all know that gambling is what makes Nevada run. The people in Nevada know it. The politicians know it. So in Nevada gambling issues can’t hide behind a smoke screen of generic morals based disapproval. The issues actually have to be seriously considered and debated.
The other aspect that makes Nevada interesting is that despite often being viewed as an “anything goes” state that throws morals, legal issues and other concerns to the wind (don’t feel sorry for them, it’s part of their marketing strategy), Nevada really does take care to operate within legal boundaries. This includes carefully watching and weighing federal law before making changes to their gambling process.
And now the Nevada Gaming Control Board has just approved an application that allows residents of the state to place sports bets from their iPhone. So, while everyone is debating online casinos and online poker rooms, folks who live in Nevada can gamble on their iPhone while freely roaming the state. Oh, Android users and Blackberry users have the same ability.
Now, the applications will only function in Nevada and are restricted to the Nevada smartphone market. So, don’t search the iPhone or Android market for the application just yet. It may be some time before we see mobile gambling in other states and for other forms of gambling than sports betting. Meanwhile if you’re looking for more information regarding online gambling, you’ll find useful info at http://dir.yahoo.com/recreation/gambling/
