Now, there are some things that Nevada is cautioning people to take into account when looking at the numbers. One is that there was a big convention in the state in March of last year, so the numbers for last year were actually higher than normal. Yes, Nevada is one of the top convention states in the US. Just check http://news.google.ca/ to find out more about big places to hold conventions and you’ll find two oddly disparate locations are among the top destination. Las Vegas an Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The reasoning is the same for each location – businesses have noticed that if they hold conventions in those places, more people attend. Las Vegas is great if you want mostly adults at your conference and Disney World is perfect for bringing in more business people with families tagging along.

Unfortunately being a big convention destination also brings a somewhat predictable problem. When the economy is down and fewer companies are holding big conventions or paying for business travel, then that side of your business suffers too. So, it’s not just vacationers who aren’t hitting Las Vegas, it’s some of their convention business.  But with the economy recovering, they may see the conventions coming back. After all, businesses have been holding off on them for a long time and that means they’re also itching to start up the cycle again. And if you must travel on business, why not go to Vegas.

First, travel to Atlantic City is already down and it had nothing to do with online gambling. The economy had an impact, but the state of Atlantic City itself had a bigger impact. People I know who travel and gamble regularly were complaining two years ago about the decrease in comps when they went to Atlantic City, the fact that they couldn’t get the same player deals that they were being offered by Las Vegas and just the state of the hotels in general. When Atlantic City started to suffer from the economic downturn, they unfortunately made the decision to save money in places where the players who were spending money at the results felt the direct effects.  Oh, I’m sure there were cut back behind the scenes, but when the players started feeling the effects, they cut back on travel to the place.  Now, some would have us believe that they started gambling online and we shouldn’t allow places like onlinecasinogamesformoney.net.

But is that what really happened? Well, the players I know started traveling to Biloxi or Las Vegas to gamble. They spent more time at smaller, local casinos. These local casinos were the ones they had complained before weren’t up to the standards of the big Atlantic City casinos. Atlantic City made the decision to lose that battle and the Internet had nothing to do with it.

Online gambling doesn’t necessarily pull people away from live casinos. Often online gamblers are an entirely different market than the folks who want to play in the live casino. Other times, online gambling is a way to practice games and build skill before visiting a live casino. And if the casinos actually do a GOOD job of being what they should be, online gambling is a way for people planning to visit a casino to learn about the games and become familiar with them before they leave. But let’s not blame online casinos for years of bad management decisions that cheapened the live casino experience.

Craps was designed for regular gamblers – people who hang around casinos long enough to learn the rules. You can check out sites like Craps Hero to find pages and pages devoted to understanding the game. The problem is that in today’s casinos, the gambler is more likely to be a casual player and perhaps even a first time player. They give the craps table a miss and head to a game that they find easier to understand, like blackjack, roulette or even slots.

But what if Craps had a makeover? Well, one company has done that. Scossa Dice is now in live Las Vegas casinos after being approved by the Nevada Gaming Commission, though I haven’t found it online yet. This is a game that takes the dice from craps and simplicity of a roulette table set up and combine them to make a fast-playing and social game. Players place their bets on the table on the number they want to bet on and the player rolls the dice. Like roulette – the win is decided based on the dice. There are some variations to make the bets variable. Like craps, you can bet on exactly what numbers will appear on the dice (a 2 and a 5 for 7) or you can bet on the number (just 7) or you can bet on a combination of numbers depending on where you place your chips.  The big bet is a triple 7 – betting that the player will roll three sevens in a row. It pays 200 to 1.

The gambling experts are still debating the game and whether or not it’s worth playing, but I think what Las Vegas is looking for is whether or not the game will draw in a crowd because it’s simply easier to understand than traditional craps.

So, here’s the play by play.  Back as far as 2008, possibly even 2006, Maryland was investigating Bodog.com and owner, Calvin Ayre. Now, Bodog would have known this by 2008 because that’s when two of Bodog.com’s payment processors where charged with money laundering. And if you’re the online poker site those payment processors work for, you know someone is going to ask if they were laundering money for you.  But it wasn’t until the Black Friday Online Poker Shutdown of April 15, 2011 that Bodog decided to take action.  Seeing that the US authorities were seizing .com domains, Bodog moved to Bodog.eu, using Bodog.com as a redirect address. Then they used their new UK licenses as an excuse to pull out of the US market. Bodog’s US customers were picked up by the new, and exactly like Bodog, Bovada.lv (notice that’s not a .com URL?).

Time went by and it became 2012 and apparently some US authorities still thought they were playing on Bodog.com even though it was just redirecting people to Bodog.eu or Bovada.lv.  So, they seized Bodog.com, causing minor upset to players who hadn’t updated their bookmarks.

But this took place after the US had also seized and shut down Megaupload.com, for entirely different reasons.  Suddenly folks were asking – hey, why does the US get to control .com address when the companies using them aren’t even in the US?  And the answer is that because the companies overseeing .com, .net and a few other domain endings operate inside the US, the US government claim jurisdiction over all domains with those endings.  Now there’s been some outcry over this but frankly, no one is big enough to force the US to back down.  The result will be that we’ll see more companies, like Bodog, who gravitate toward domain names managed in more liberal countries, like Latvia. Nope, not kidding. Bovada.lv is a Latvian domain.

Latvia, for those who wondered just where it is.

But players still want reassurance that the casino or poker site that they play on is safe when it comes to deposits and money.  And one poker affiliate site has recently released ratings of the payment processing for various poker rooms. Now, keep in mind they aren’t rating everything. Just the payment processing aspect.  But the good news for players in the US is that Americas Cardroom, which was formerly Doyles Room, scored an A-, one of the highest scores given.  The scoring is based in part of the speed of payment processing by the poker room and Americas Cardroom just seems to move faster than the other poker rooms.

Now, while ratings like this are great to help keep track of the poker industry and sites like gamblingreviews.com provide insight and information into the online casino industry, it’s still important to remember not to use your gambling account like a bank.  Only keep as much in them as you need to play and request to withdraw winnings on a regular basis.  This advice is probably toughest for the professional poker players because they depend on being able to sit down at a high stakes game and play, so they’ll have more money in their accounts. But if you’re a casual slots player, don’t keep more money in your account that you can afford to lose at slots.  And if you win big, start the withdrawal process early because many online casinos do limit how much you can take out at one time. If you win that Progressive jackpot, it may take a while to collect all your winnings.

We’ve been hearing for months now about Groupe Bernard Tapie wanting to purchase Full Tilt, and before that what we had were rumors of a mysterious European investor interested in the company.  But now the folks at GBT are waving another warning flag that the deal just may not go as rumors keep trying to lead us to believe it will.  They now claim that the old Full Tilt Poker Pros owe the company $17 million in borrowed funds and that is an obstacle in the deal.

Now, it is likely that pros, and even some regular players, owe money to the poker company. It was suggested not long after their problems started that they’d been loaning money to the pros to keep them playing. And with regular players it was just a case of bad book keeping.  When a player made a deposit to their account, Full Tilt would make the money available for them to play on before banks actually cleared the deposits and apparently sometimes they never actually took back that advance they gave players to play on. This ready availability of funds was part of what attracted so many players to Full Tilt and made them one of the top online poker rooms.

But what about the pros and the money they were loaned?  Well some are claiming that they don’t owe the company any money and that the records are wrong. But there also seems to be a bit of a protest on part of the American pros not to pay back unless they know their funds go toward paying back US players. Because despite all the rumors that GBT is going to save Full Tilt, it seems that they really have no plans to pay back the US accounts.  You know, that’s enough to make me agree that the US pros shouldn’t pay back GBT.

Yep, Zynga is testing a new Bingo game for Facebook but folks who play the popular Bingo Blitz are pointing out that the new Zynga game looks a lot like Bingo Blitz. And this isn’t the first time people have noticed that Zynga games aren’t really, well, original.  Now, I suspect the Bingo game is part of their plans to move into the real money gambling arena. I’m just not sure it’s an arena they belong in.

The online gambling market is a crowded one with a few top players in the game. I’m talking about top players being the online casinos that I would recommend people play at. These are the big names and there’s a reason they’re at the top and that’s reliability.  But lately Zynga, which has offered Texas Hold’em Poker as a casual game on Facebook for years, has been looking to move into the real money poker market in the UK.  So, it really should come as no surprise that they’ve introduced a bingo game.

While players in the US may not think of online bingo as a big money market, in the UK, bingo is the top drawing game for female players.  So, Zynga appears to be looking at this as a marketing choice of poker for the guys and bingo for the gals.  Unfortunately charges have already surfaced that Zynga’s bingo game looks a lot like an existing game on Facebook.  At this point, I haven’t yet been able to find the game online, though I tend to avoid the Zynga games like a plague of Farmville locusts.

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?

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.

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 15^th 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.