Online Poker Continues to Fight

It looked very likely that the campaign to have online poker games regulated rather than banned would be the USA’s final destination in the argument over the legality of online gaming. Barney Frank’s attempts at helping the campaign through his presenting of the H.R. 5767, or the Payment Systems Protection Act, that would delay UIGEA until the Federal Reserve defined “Unlawful Internet Gambling” was helpful in raising optimism that UIGEA may be completely repealed. This week, however, things took a further turn for the worse thanks to some unfortunate political circumstances in the senate.

The Democrats lost the election to fill the senate seat vacated by the passing of Edward “Ted” Kennedy. This meant that they now hold only 59 seats in the senate. With senate elections coming up in November poker blogger Lou Kreiger now fears the focus in the senate has now shifted into protecting their majority rather than supporting online poker. Believing that this will now cause Democrats to view online poker as an argument they can do without Kreiger also believes the UIGEA act will therefore come into force on June 1st as proposed which is a devastating blow to the campaign to legalise and therefore regulate poker in the USA.

Without counter legislation UIGEA defines the key term “Unlawful Internet Gambling” as “…means to place, receive, or otherwise knowingly transmit a bet or wager by any means which involves the use, at least in part, of the Internet where such bet or wager is unlawful under any applicable Federal or State law in the State or Tribal lands in which the bet or wager is initiated, received, or otherwise made.” Passing UIGEA would make life very difficult for USA players to play poker and prevent another poker boom taking place when the USA players return to the player pool online.

Another blow to the US poker players market was that MasterCard, known for its proactive efforts to prevent players depositing to online gaming, worked out how poker rooms were manipulating the code for transactions and blocked such uncoded transactions from taking place. This immediately meant that Doyles Room, Bodog and Absolute Poker among other sites immediately removed MasterCard as a deposit option.

There has been a “cat and mouse” war raging between MasterCard and poker rooms for many years and this is not the first time that MasterCard worked out a way to block such transactions. Poker rooms have, in the past, worked out a way to get deposits working again and will be working to do so again. Part of the six month hiatus between UIGEA being announced and being implemented is to allow the Federal Reserve to consider how it will be enforced. It looks like that may be difficult, but unfortunately for poker players the bill looks increasingly less likely to be repealed. Players will hope that VISA does not also work out a way to block deposits, and VISA are rumoured to be researching how to block such transactions at the moment.

Poker players are prepared to pay tax on their poker playing in return for being allowed to play it. Indeed the US government would have access to hundreds of billions of dollars from US player gaming revenues to raise tax which makes the ban even more bizarre.

Players look determined to exercise what they believe is their right to do what they wish with their own money in spite of the ruling. Mass refusal of the bills authority would make it very difficult to enforce and the players look like rebelling in numbers. I believe the US government would do better to use revenues from a regulated poker playing community to generate extra tax to help the economy recover from recent recessions rather than forcing gambling, which will occur regardless as it has in the past, into a black market situation.

By Malcolm Clarke

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Tags: barney frank, play poker, poker, uigea, usa poker