“Reports of my death…

“Reports of my death…

… have been greatly exaggerated,” said all-American poker player and Adventures of Huckelberry Finn writer Mark Twain upon reading of his own demise. Your humble bureau chief wonders what he’d have made of the drama in online poker at the moment.
Not only did Black Friday — when the U.S. Department of Justice indicted the founders of the world’s three largest online poker rooms and shut them out of the U.S. market — rob U.S. poker players of a chance to exercise a fundamental right to choose what one does with one’s time and money, but the subsequent closure of Full Tilt Poker by its regulator, the Alderney Gambling Control Commssion (AGCC), has shut out European poker players, frozen bankrolls, and thrust online poker into mainstream media in a negative light.
By the time you read this things will likely have changed massively again — the AGCC will have had its public hearing on Full Tilt in London and news will likely have broken about whether or not a proposed deal for the sale of the company was successful.
However, as Twain correctly observed about inaccurate reports of his own death, so we should not exaggerate the death of online poker. As we point out in our Inside Straight news section the World Series of Poker has had a bumper year. The main event was the third largest ever and overall numbers were up at the Series — perhaps not unsurprising given a U.S. player’s only option these days is to play live.
Elsewhere Joe Barton of the U.S. House of Representatives has published a bill which seeks to regulate and legalise online poker (and payment processing) at a federal level (see Online Poker News).
The bill has significant support and while its still too early to say realistically what chances of success it has, the thrust towards regulation and taxation in the U.S. is inexorable.
“Poker is an all-American game, and it’s a game that requires strategy and skill,” says Barton. “Millions of Americans play poker online. Although it’s legal to play for money, it’s illegal to process the transactions that allow players to collect their earnings. We want to have an iron-clad system to make sure that those who play for money are playing in an honest, fair system where they can reap the benefits of their winnings. To put it simply, this bill is about having the personal freedom to play a skill-based game you enjoy without fear of breaking the law.”
One day, and probably soon, U.S. players should be able to play online real money games again. What form this takes — be it at state level, or federal level — remains to be seen but the overwhelming support for this most basic of freedoms means it will eventually be framed in law. The fact that ordinary working Americans have had a means to earn a living, and indeed a means to pass time playing a game of skill, taken away is not lost on most U.S. politicians today. The question now is not if but when some form of regulated real money online poker will be available to U.S citizens again.
What will happen to Full Tilt Poker is an entirely different question and no-one really knows the answer to it yet. ♠