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Internet Poker Could Make a Comeback By Going Brick-and-Mortar
pigrabbitbear writes "It's the most modern lament in retail: Brick-and-mortar shopping has gone the way of the dodo as everyone buys their junk online. But for the once-booming online gambling market, salvation may require a reversal of that trend. For one online gaming giant, buying a casino in Atlantic City is the first step to bring Internet poker back to the U.S. In 2006, playing online poker for real cash was deemed illegal. While that didn't stop more serious players from playing, especially once the big hosts started funneling cash offshore, the FBI and DoJ's crackdown on April 15, 2011 did. The big trio of online poker – PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker – were all shut down, domains seized, and executives arrested on charges related to fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. While PokerStars and others continued operations in foreign, legal markets, the U.S. poker craze pretty much collapsed. That doesn't mean the lucrative market has gone away. Now, the Rational Group, which owns both PokerStars and Full Tilt, may be hinting at a workaround: the company is looking to buy a struggling casino in Atlantic City. Rational faces a rather large mess of regulatory hurdles, but if it does end up acquiring the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, it would have a huge foothold in New Jersey's young market for internet gambling."
"The big trio of online poker ... were all shut down, domains seized, and executives arrested on charges related to fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling"
It'd be nice if something like that were to happen to some banks these days.
Why was this even accepted?
I was a semi-pro and quit about 3 months before black friday.. Don't miss it a bit and hope my kids never take it up..
I like to touch my junk before I buy it
This is best done in the privacy of one's home.
Internet poker going brink-and-mortar is just plain old poker. Something that never did go out of fashion.
Unless out here people are sitting in a casino on terminals, playing with each other. That might work. Internet poker in a closed sealed room. I await movies made about this.
Wouldnt internet poker going brick-and-mortar make it a casino?
How does owning a brick and mortar casino in the states make an illegal service feasible? Online poker for real money is still against federal law. If it wasn't all the casinos would be doing it.
It is kind of like buying a pharmacy and saying that makes it legal for you to sell weed.
Silence is a state of mime.
It's the most modern lament in retail: Brick-and-mortar shopping has gone the way of the dodo as everyone buys their junk online.
I thing that's must be American thing, because the malls are packed here in Vancouver Canada. Or maybe we're the exeption to the rule.
and if you're anything like the dozen or so people i've met who also claim to be making ridiculous amounts of money on online poker, you aren't either. in my experience, online poker players are particularly likely to overexaggerate their winnings while not mentioning their losses. furthermore, nearly all such players try to tell me of the sites where there are many novice/donk players out there that can be reliably won from. none of these claims stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny for a number of reasons, and there is excellent reason to suggest that as with brick and mortar casinos, the only people consistently making good coin are the casinos themselves or the russian hackers who extort them.
If you post it online is it still in the privacy of your own home? ;)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I need cards if I'm going to play. I just don't trust the computer to be honest. I don't have any way of knowing if there's a scam going on where some of the other players are privy to my hand. With real cards, I have at least some awareness of what's going on. With electronic cards, I have no way of knowing if I'm just having a bad day or being cheated.
Funny name for a company that exists only due to its customers suppressing that line of thought when they place their bets
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Maybe the online poker industry should take a cue from WoW where player conventions are huge. Online players get to meet face-to-face. They could set up regional, national and international events to attract players for special prizes and recognition. The conventions could have workshops by leading players etc.
I prefer burning my money, or the lottery...
Sure, but if you're losing the most likely explanation is that you suck, not that the software is cheating you.
The only reason Online Poker is illegal is because the Brick and Mortars don't like the perceived idea of losing business. So they lobbied against it. Now if Pokerstars starts making Brick and Mortar Casinos and taking away from the business of them, I'd feel smug.
I'm a winning poker player up %100,000 until Black Friday hit(Poker is a game of skill). Now I'm just waiting to be able to play Full Tilt again as I have a great strategy for Rush Poker.
Until Pokerstars and Full Tilt get legalized, I'm stuck on Carbon Poker.
God spoke to me
Add to those events the US billionaire casino owner who lobbied Washington hard to shut down the competition from the Internet. Guess which other country he's connected to?
I have heard some crackpots in my time, but really...
I'm not a gambler. I'm a mathematician. That doesn't automatically mean that I'm opposed to it, nor that I'd win all the time, nor that I see the odds of winning and just say "no point, then". I *have* gambled, amounts of money I could easily afford to lose, and had fun doing so.
I was on a cruise ship (which have TERRIBLE reputations for gambling in some parts of the world BECAUSE of being forced off-shore in order to do it, but this was the QE2 before she was retired and hence a bit more refined), and there was a poker game.
The stakes were low (an introductory evening), and I was on holiday. I could spend £50 on a meal quite easily, or £100 on a trip to somewhere, or £50 in the gift shop, or £100 on a dance lesson - there was any number of ways to fritter money away to enjoy yourself. Hell, there was a cinema on-board.
But we were at sea for the evening, and I ended up at the poker table. For a matter of £20 I stayed on the table for hours, playing, winning, losing, learning, moving chips. I didn't bother to count the cards or the odds of every move, or judge my opponents, I just played and talked and had a laugh. And it was one of the best £20 I've ever spent.
Now you can say that's the problem, it's making losing money fun. But, where I live, the ticket for two for a blurry, jerky movie, in a crowded, noisy, dirty, smelly public cinema costs more than that, and is less fun. Hell, the DVD would almost run to that and I'd have to have expensive equipment to play it, support drug-addled actors and Hollywood accounting, not to mention DRM and mindless pap. Is that really a better alternative?
Every place I've ever worked has had a lottery syndicate, or made their own "lottery" games of some kind or other (just bet for the bonus ball in a small group of people, etc.).
Gambling is like a gun. It's harmless unless you choose to use or misuse it (I'm VEHEMENTLY for gun control, check my posts, I hate the idea of a private individual near me holding a gun of any legal status). The problem is not the gun, nor the gambling, but the people you let play with it. Some people are JUST THAT STUPID that they will throw away money they can't afford on games they don't understand how to play. But if they didn't, they'd spend it on the shopping channel on crap, give it to some nutter evangelist on the God channel, or some other outlet.
If you don't have the willpower to stay away from gambling, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or buying designer clothes, or getting the latest iPhone, or whatever it is that is your "vice", then you're going to fall down somewhere sooner or later. Ban the casinos and the gambling goes underground and people get into debt (which they wouldn't be allowed to do in a casino without their bank's assistance, and where people would start breaking kneecaps to recoup their losses instead of chasing you via the courts), do it in unlicensed premises, people aren't aware of the risks, are given counterfeit money in their winnings, etc. etc etc.
The problem is not any of these things. Not porn, or prostitution, or drugs, or gambling, or anything else you think of as a vice. The problem is stupid people who have no willpower, no way to question themselves and say "Should I be doing this?" or "Have I gone too far?" or even "Do I need help?". Babysitting them by "banning" things DOES NOT WORK. Sure, you need to enforce laws and curb excesses that are damaging but gambling is a purely voluntary pastime.
All you do by stopping it is drive it underground where it causes more problems, or babysit people who blame you for their own mistakes the next time your ban allows circumvention or comes too slowly.
Take responsibility for your own life, FORCE others to worry about theirs, not babysit grown-ups who pile themselves into debt.
And, to be honest, in terms of willpower the weakest people I know are those that bel
Or could it be that the other changes in the world contributed to it's decline?
The new trade routes robbed it's traders of the exclusivity of their goods, stronger neighbors made it hard to capture (or even hold) land, new weapons made it impossible to rely on just city walls for defense,.....
I've always wondered why the online poker services that were under siege for so many years didn't contact/partner with the Indian gaming casinos?
As I understand, they have a broad-brush immunity to gambling laws Federally, I'm no expert certainly but that seems like a nice, safe, legal foundation for hosting online real-money gambling.
-Styopa
The Nevada Gaming Commission has already issued a license to run an online poker site to the American Casino & Entertainment Properties. The site is called AcePlay Poker, and is branded with the Stratosphere Casino. For now, it's only a free play site, but they are working on getting agreements with other states to allow actual pay games.
I was a semi-pro and quit about 3 months before black friday.. Don't miss it a bit...
You were that good, huh... :p
Just this morning, the Atlantic City casino Revel filed for bankruptcy, one year after the casino opened. Granted, it was an ambitious plan, including a non-smoking environment, but with gambling in surrounding states draining clientele, the entire AC casino industry is suffering.
This isn't to say they can't make this work, but if they're relying on a majority of their income from poker, well, putting ones eggs in one basket comes to mind.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I want US based online sports betting
There seems to be some confusion. Internet gambling wasn't banned. They passed a law (stuck in at the last second into an antiterrorism bill, with no debate, when everyone was gone for a holiday) which made it illegal to process payments related to Internet gambling.
This is why the "hard core" can still do it. You just need an offshore bank account with a company that isn't bound by US laws not to process gambling related payments. It's not a crime for someone from the US to gamble online, at least not on the federal level in the US, it's just a little tricky to move your money around to banks and payment processors that are outside US laws.
There's no need for darknet, hiding, or anything like that. It's just a matter of logistics with moving the money around to fund and cash out the accounts.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How about we just go with the old, established brick and mortar casino game full of danger, excitement, thrilling drama....BINGO! :-D Pretty much every casino has Bingo. The one near me actually has a poker room and Bingo but still, World Series of Bingo sounds pretty tempting. From what I hear, there are a lot more fist fights and chair throwing in Bingo than Texas Hold Em.
The only reason gambling is so tightly regulated, and the only reason playing poker on the Internet is illegal, is because the government hates competition.
The government wants you playing government-run lotteries, like Powerball and Megamillions.
Sure, no way of knowing. Not hand history, win/loss analysis, expected value based on your play, etc. If you don't realize the game is all about numbers, and that those numbers are there for your analysis, then maybe you shouldn't be playing online.
Or, on second thought, maybe you should. I'll send you an invite to my private room. There's lots of donks and noobs there, ripe for the picking.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Sigh, this sort of arrogance is why these scams will continue into the future.
So, what you're saying, is that as long as somebody only cheats a little, that's OK for them to be undetectable. Nice to know that. And no, I won't be playing cards with somebody who has such a low set of ethics.
The fact of the matter is that there are scams like the one I mentioned that happen from time to time where somebody has access to information that they shouldn't have. And are ultimately only caught when they try to push things too far. You don't have to win a huge number of games to make a nice living cheating, you just need to make a few hundred a week.
I'm saying that any significant cheating will be detected, and any cheating so small as to fly under the radar requires so much work and gets such little results-- that it'd be cheaper and easier to earn money doing almost ANYTHING else.
Also, 99.9% of the time, if you think you're being cheated-- you're playing poorly.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
It's technically possible for a crooked casino to be cheating with real cards (e.g. as in Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels). It's just a bit easier to do for online casinos. Detecting cheating by the house is probably about equally hard for online and real casinos. It would require a bunch of data and statistical analysis to find systemic cheating, or actually catching them in the act somehow (e.g. finding a hidden camera, or hacking into the poker server, or acquiring a confession from an insider) for individual cases.
Actually, the only way your number can be perceived as inaccurate, is to realize it's coming from an Anonymous Coward with absolutely no data to back it up. You might claim that data exists, and it very well might, but you'll have to understand if other people don't believe your claims without more information.
The summary is incorrect. Playing online poker was NOT deemed illegal, despite the name of that bill.
Payment processing to online poker sites was made illegal (e.g. credit card payments).
The various other things that people involved with sites did were sometimes illegal payment processing, sometimes other scummy things.
(BTW, I have never played online poker, but I listen to some poker podcasts & watch WPT & WSOP.)