2008 US Poker Archive News
News on the minute can be located at the main USpoker webpage.
April 29
12:51am – While we’re talking about payment processors there is an interesting news piece about aguy named Daniel Tzvetkoff who purchased a $28million mansion in Brisbane AU. This is supposedly the guy who was behind Gatorpay which was runby Intabill at Full Tilt and according to rumors he owes a lot of people money who are in the adultindustry. They’re calling him the “Mystery Millionaire”….I wonder why he’s so mysterious. 
Justgoes to show we all need to watch out and be careful.
April 28
9:28pm – The Merge Network which includes Carbon Poker, and Poker.com software (not the site) andother skins will be adding Pic-Club asa deposit option for US players. It is expected to go live tonight or tomorrow. In short, the optionis said to be UIGEA proof by Pic-Club lawyers. This is the first major poker room to use this option. Pic-Club said another network will be joining their option shortly.
5:38pm – I updated the Microgaming list of banned states. Im not exactly sure when the policy cameinto place but Microgaming poker sites used to be on an 11 state ban. They are currently on a 3 stateban including Washington, Louisiana, and Illinois. Somehow Doylesroom does not exclude Illinois asI’ve been told. The strange thing about this whole situation is the poker rooms will tell you whichstates they exclude but Microgaming casinos give you this automated response, whether it’s by phoneor live support. I’ll get to the bottom of this. 
Management has not authorized me to discuss issues of legality with customers. Casino policy isthat the customer is responsible for determining the legality of their participation in their stateor country of residence and I am unfortunately unable to provide you with any guidance or advicein this regard.
April 26
12:33am – Here is the end of the week recap. Gambling911 is reporting that Partygaming is close tosettling with the US DOJ. It will require millions to be paid out and jail time for Party founders. Partygaming says there will be no deal if jail time is involved and that is what’s holding up the deal.
I spoke with an ex manager at Bodog about Calvin Ayre’s retirement and while Ayre says he’s just tiredof traveling and being “in the spot light” the conversation I had leaned more towards him being tiredof having certain people (you know who) watching every move he makes. If anyone is on the to get listby the US DOJ, he’s one on the top. Bodog’s business has been steadily decreasing amongst US playersbecause of failing deposit and withdraw options as well.
There were 10 more cosponsors to sign on this week to Barney Franks new legislation which would stopthe regulations for the UIGEA from being published. Our Evil Senator Kyl responded to this new legislation,HR 5767, with one of the weakest letters I’ve read in awhile, not to mention some very erroneous factsabout gambling if you ask me. One of them was that college aged internet gambling has decreased 75% because of the UIGEA. Maybe Senator Kyl should take a look at our poker site timeline of player statistics which we keep on this page above and then he can report on the REAL facts. The full article and discussion can be read at twoplustwo.
The PerspectivesWeekly video discusses Calvin’s retirement, France’s consideration of legal online gamblingand a case where someone tried to sue NBC’s Deal or No Deal claiming it was illegal gambling. Itwas of course thrown out by the judge even though technically it is gambling and no different fromthe gambling we do on the internet.
April 22
2:09am – The Poker Players Alliance has hit 1,000,000 members this week. Back when Barney Frank firstjoined the PPA he said, 1 million was the number they need to get things done. Let’s see if he’s rightand can get HR 5767 passed and put an end to the UIGEA regulations.
April 21
7:06pm – Barney Frank and Ron Paul have issued a letter to the Treasury Department and the FederalReserve. In the letter they state the basic principles that the Treasury is finding out, the UIGEAus unworkable and their new legislation released this month gives them a way out of having to comeup with regulations which are impossible.
12:00 – The following are the 7 day affects on poker site traffic because of Epassporte abandoningUS poker players. The numbers are calculated by averaging the 7 day peak real money players beforethe Epassporte pullout to the 7 day average after the Epassporte pullout. Epassporte quit allowingtheir deposit option in the middle of the day on April 11th. Because of this I did not use this datein the averages so the averages are from April 4-10th and April 12-18th. I did not bother doing statsfor non-US accepted sites because it wasn’t popular with other countries.
- Pokerstars 22,613 prior pullout & 22,843 after pullout = 1% increase in players
- Fulltiltpoker 9982 prior pullout & 9975 after pullout = ~ 0% change
- Ultimatebet 2912 prior pullout & 2204 after pullout = 24% decrease
- Absolutepoker 1941 prior pullout & 1952 after pullout = .5% increase
- Microgaming 1802 prior pullout & 1434 after pullout = 20% decrease
- Cake Network 1927 prior pullout & 1809 after pullout = 6% decrease
As you can see both sites, Full Tilt and Poker Stars remained constant as predicted because of theirecheck option readily in place. In general, Fulltilt traffic has steadily declined 16% over the past few months for reasons unknown. While doing the analysis I noticed that directly after the pullout,site traffic went down somewhat dramatically at most sites but then bounced right back up towards theend of the week. So even those showing negatives are beginning to bounce back. The only site to really suprise me was Absolutepoker. I would have expected them to be in the negatives closer to Ultimatebet.
April 20
2:31pm – Our thoughts and condolences go out to Brandi Hawbakers family. Brandi (26), the professional poker player took her life this week. Very sad news.
I will have the post-epassporte pullout stats posted tonight.
April 18
8:08pm – J Todd covers Epassporte, the new anti-UIGEA legislation and some more stuff. Overall an important video this week. Also by tomorrow or Sunday I’ll have the 1 week average impact of Epassporte shutting down when it comes to poker site traffic. I’ll do the normal sites in the chart above but I’m also going to do it for 4-5 of the other major brands. From preliminary looks it seems most sites are slowly recovering and the negative impact is already dissipating.
April 15
2:03pm – I’ve been talking back and forth with Ian, Merge Network Marketing Director, that handles the main brands of Carbon Poker and Poker.com (the platform). When they were hit with Epassporte denying their services a few months back it hurt their business quite badly because like so many other sites at the moment, they relied primarily on Epassporte as their customer base. Fortunately after talkingwith them they bounced back. That’s good news for the likes of Cake Poker, Absolute Poker, UB etcbecause they are similar to the Merge Network with Epassporte being their main deposit option. Onething Ian said they did to bounce back was to look into the credit card denial problems and make thisoption more accessible to players. Plus in the end, they began offering better incentives to players to gain back players they lost so in the end, it was good for the player.
April 13
10:02pm – I can already see that some sites are getting hit hard by this epassporte issue. Alot ofthe microgaming skins are getting killed, including Doylesroom. The Cake Poker Network is going toneed to do some major damage control and same with Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. These sites aredown a minimum of 25% – 35% in traffic because of the Epassporte pullout. The only two sites to notsee much of a change are Pokerstars.com and Fulltiltpoker.com because of the Instant echeck option they are telling people to use. When Carbonpokerlost epassporte late last year because of casino issues it was basically the death of them until they bounced back by various marketing means. I’m willing to predict that Togglecard,not really in use by poker sites yet, will soon be the predecessor to Epassporte.
12:36pm – Barney Frank and Ron Paul have introduced new legislation in efforts to stop the regulationsof the UIGEA that restrict banks and other services from having to stop gambling deposits. Basically the legislation says that the Treasury wouldn’t have to work on the daunting task of trying to revise or publish the regulations for blocking gaming transactions, which even they say is almost impossible. So in essence the new legislation, HR 5767 throws out the UIGEA completely.
April 12
4:26pm – Some have asked to see the official letter sent about the denial of US poker deposits byEpassporte. Here it is.
1:43pm – By now most are pretty much accepting the fact that epassporte is done for and are more worriedabout withdrawing their funds, rightfully so after the Neteller crap. I thought it would be interestingto see how much money Epassporte made of us poker players during this short period. Just take a lookat their Alexatraffic report and also Googletrends report to see how much their traffic jumped (and likely revenues) during this time. A simpleemail letter stating their position and strategy would have been nice after all the money players madethem, instead of people having to rely on rumors and 3rd party forums.
12:39pm – According to a supposed leak from Pitbullpoker, Epassporte shut down poker deposits becauseof the widespread investigation of internet gambling by the US DOJ and they do not want to be connectedto anything considered illegal. I wish it wasn’t Saturday so I could get more confirmations on this but everyone is off MSN today.
12:30pm – Epassporte still hasn’t issued a statement. Also, if this was “technical difficulties”like Epassporte support said before it is likely they would have been fixed by now. I tried callingbut as you can imagine the first thing they say is they’re experiencing a large volume of calls soI didnt feel like getting put on hold for 3 hours.
12:02 am – It is with great regret that I have to post this but Epassporte seems to have shut downfor US poker deposits. This all happened mid-day today and it is network (s) wide and not an isolatedpoker site. Echecks at Pokerstars.com is now the best option to deposit in my opinion. To my knowledge epassporte wasthe last fully functional ewallet to serve US poker players, as a true ewallet. While Epassportehas not made an official statement on the matter it is still unclear if this a rumor or true. Oneposter spoke to a rep. from Epassporte and the rep. said it was all a technical malfunction and thatno policies have changed. We all know from past experiences how “in the know” support staff can be. Until now we have to wait for epassporte to make an official statement because the poker sites don’tknow what happened either. If it was technical, you’d think epassporte would let them know, if theywere dropping US players would they let them know ahead of time?
April 10
1:17pm – This post was deleted upon request of Partygaming.
1:09pm – 888 announced earlier this week that revenues were up by 106% in 2007 compared to 2006 figures. When referring to the UIGEA the CEO said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. They did notmention that they slashed affiliate earnings nearly in half because of a stringent new policy theyadded to their program. This probably had quite an impact on revenues as well.
April 9
12:08am – Its been slow moving this week thus far ever since the committee hearing. Jerrold Nadlerjoined as a co-sponsor of HR 2046 bringing the total to 48 co-sponsors. Seems like everyone is onSpring Break or enjoying the nice weather. 
April 4
2:12pm – Ok so I’m finally starting to sift through what happened at the committee hearing on April2nd. Brian from the Poker Players Alliance has put up the best review so far. Short and to the point,and sounds very positive. Here is the articleat the PPA. Besides the review they have chronologized all the speakers in seperate youtube videoswhich can also be found at the PPA website here. For the players in general it’s all about when the regulations will be published and how strong theywill be. From watching a few videos you can tell the regulations aren’t even close to being done. How could they? This hearing also seems to confirm they will be weakened and pushed back even further. It’s pretty clear most people wish they could just make this whole thing just go away.
April 2
8:55am – In my last post there is the source for the live broadcast of the Barney Frank meeting today. I was going to be watching it live and doing a recap but because it’s my birthday and the waves arereally good, you’ll have to either watch it live or wait until later so I can do a recap. Also theguys over at twoplustwo.com in the “legal” forum will likely be discussing things as they happen ifyou really want to know how it went.
April 1
12:20am – Barney Frank’s Hearing on “The Proposed UIGEA Regulations: Burden without Benefit” will be held 10:00am EST tomorrow. Thatis the link to more information and also the link to where you can watch the live webcast. Frankwants to show, “that the regulations can’t be done given the inherent nature of the issue.” I’llbe watching and will give my brief review as well….even though it’s on my birthday. 
Also, an article which I haven’t seen posted anywhere in which Barney Frank and Ron Paul question“national security” status of the EU/WTO deal was discovered. If you haven’t followed the WTO issues,basically the United States said, because of national security issues, they couldn’t release anythingabout the deal they did with the EU regarding certain things like compensation amounts they gave theEU for withdrawing their gambling committments to the rest of the world. The letter is only 3 paragraphs and ends with this sentence.
We need to know how much the United States government has conceded in furtherance of this ill-advisedpolicy, in addition to the losses we have already sustained at the WTO, and we expect a prompt responseto this request.
