December 2008 US Updates Regarding Legal Poker Matters
December 31
2:09pm – As you know I like to follow stats on poker sites. Last night Poker Stars reached 150,000 players at once. That’s bigger than Party Poker ever was and is the most ever recorded at one room. It’s obvious that word is spreading that you can still play poker on the internet, the use of echecks is making things easier to deposit and their global marketing strategy is paying off. Other US sites saw an increase as well. Party Poker showed an increase but their player volumes continue to bounce around all over the place.
December 28
12:49pm - I talked to Mr. Rose and he said he would write a State of the Industry 2008 article for us. It should be finished within a week. Here is the Perspectives Weekly in which J. Todd talks about last weeks news. Also in the news, Germany stated online gambling will be officially banned come January 1, 2008.
December 26
6:34pm – So, hopefully everyone had a good Christmas and few days off from work. I’m going to see if Mr. Nelson Rose, Gambling Law Professor, will write a “State of the Industry” article for us now that the WTO cases have ended. There are a lot of good experts commenting on what transpired the past week but it will be nice to get his opinion and also what he expects to see in the future. I’ll be emailing him tonight and if he agrees, he usually has a turnaround time of about a week for these types of articles. If you have any specific questions you’d like to ask feel free to email me them and I’ll take them into consideration. (info @ ihatespam compatiblepoker.com). Remove the spaces and ihatespam part.
December 23
2:30am – Here’s the Perspectives Weekly video recap by J. Todd. He covers the EU/US WTO deal and gives 5 things we can still be hopeful for…one which was squashed on Friday (the Antigua WTO case).
December 21
1:15pm – The following is from the conference call currently going on, which is very difficult to hear so I’ll try and be as accurate as possible. Mark Mendel is calling this a “horrible ruling” because he believes it will cause terrible problems in the future. Antigua was looking for compliance which the US could do, but instead they used the arbitration panel to not only lower the amount in which they had to pay, but to also not allow Antigua partial access. He also says they don’t really have a plan on how they’ll use the compensation as they were looking for compliance not necessarily compensatory damages. Mendel also said they would have expected at minimum $1 billion in compensation which would hopefully have lead the US down the road of allowing access.
12:42pm – The arbitration panel has decided on the amount of compensation Antigua will get. The amount is $21 million. The number they were asking for….$3.4 billion so yes, basically Antigua lost this case. It looks as if the panel only calculated in the loss of horserace betting and not all remote-gambling which they valued at $104 million. Even so, that number is still way less than the billions Antigua thought they had claim to. Mark Mendel, lead counsel in this case is having a conference call in a few minutes (1pm EST). The number is 605-475-4333. The access code is 224598. Also here is the full 80 page WTO report.
December 20
1:15am – Jay Cohen has stated that the WTO Decision on Antigua vs the US over internet gambling will come out this Friday. These are his words posted on twoplustwo.
“Just got the word. WTO decision is coming out on Friday. They are saying decision on Friday not an announcement on when there will be a decision. Pucker up folks.”
I forgot to talk about the D’Amato interview on Fox Business News two days ago which was supposed to be about the WTO issues. Anyways, it was very short and talked very little about the WTO problems. D’Amato went into his normal, you can gamble on horses but not poker speech. When the Fox guy asked, what if the WTO asked to allow illegal drugs…. D’amato almost couldn’t answer. For once when that question is asked I’d like them to say, “next time they serve me a line of crack in a brick and mortar casino at one of the 48 states that I can gamble in, then that question you just asked might be valid.” I hate to say bad things about anyone sticking up for us but D’amato really needs to stop rehashing the same old garbage that most everyone knows already.
December 19
8:03pm – Full Tilt is now allowing Visa withdrawls for those lucky enough to be able to deposit using a credit/debit card.
December 18
11:55am – Senator D’amato, Chairman of the Poker Players Alliance will be on Fox Business Network today discussing the WTO announcements made yesterday and how it affects us. Air time is 3:45pm EST. If I come across a webcast of it I’ll post it tonight.
11:36am – There is a trial instant echeck method being used at Fulltiltpoker.com now. It is said to be in “beta” testing so before you get your hopes up….it’s limited to only a few number of players at this time. It is also just being used for deposits. Full Tilt says they expect to have the withdrawl option available in the future. There is a deposit limit of $5k and people are reporting 3-8 days for withdraws to hit their bank account. If you remember, Poker Stars was taking months for withdraws to be processed when they first released echecks as an option.
December 17
11:23pm – No announcement ended up being made on when the Antigua vs US internet gambling compensation case would be decided. It was supposed to be announced today but instead we got the US / EU bomb dropped on us. You never know, if compensations keep racking up, down the road Congress just might decide they don’t want to pay these sanctions anymore and do away with the UIGEA.
11:07am – Various news reports are stating that the US and European Union have struck a deal in the WTO compensation agreements with one report saying it is still a “proposed” deal. The compensation amount has not been announced but they released how the deal would work. The US will change the ways they compete in the mailing sector. For example, how Fedex and UPS compete with DHL (which is a German based company). This is the kind of deal you could have expected between the two. Agreement compensations that deal more in government related industries. Overall its bad news but it will be interesting to see how much they agreed upon. Because of the industry they’re using for this agreement compensation, one might conclude the amount is still quite large.
December 15
5:37pm – Per the WTO / Antigua delay, articles are now saying that Monday they will announce when the report will come out. So, it’s not coming out Monday but they’ll let us know when it comes out….on Monday. Here is J. Todd’s Perspective Weekly video for this week.
December 14
1:01pm – According to Mrs. Hamel of the US Trade office the WTO/Antigua ruling has been delayed. No future deadlines were given, not that they matter anyways right?
12:05pm – Nothing has been published regarding the WTO compensation amounts for Antigua as of yet. The two sources where it will likely get published first are Antiguawto.com or at Antiguasun.com.
Also, today marks the last day that Paytru was able to be used at PokerStars. That option officially bites the dust today for deposits.
December 13
10:08pm – Now that the commenting period has ended for the UIGEA regulations attention has focused on the WTO dispute….with a deadline coming Friday. The World Trade Organization arbitration panel will give its ruling over online gambling. Friday also marks the deadline for the US and EU negotiations in coming up with agreeable compensations. Antigua expects “big” compensations ($3.4 billion) while the US felt $500,000 was more reasonable. The announcements will be made tomorrow. The EU and US negotiations are likely to be delayed.
December 12
8:24am – Today marks the final day for the commenting period on the regulations for the UIGEA. If you haven’t sent in a comment and would like to do so you still can. After today, the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board will review the comments submitted and make possible revisions to the regulations. There is no timeframe on these “revisions”….we still have a long way to go before anything changes.
December 10
12:17pm – Mr. Nelson Rose, Gambling Law Professor, wrote a good article that was just published at Pokerpages titled, “Neteller: You and the Feds – Attention Online Poker Players“. The heart of the article talks about how Neteller struck a deal with the US Attorney’s Southern District of NY, the ones who arrested the co-founders of Neteller. The deal….frozen US funds were allowed to be scrutinized by Navigant Consulting. As we’ve been warning everyone all along it’s about the taxes. Mr. Rose says the US DOJ went through this trouble to see who was paying their taxes. In the last few paragraphs he talks about what you should do if you didn’t pay your taxes on gambling winnings for previous years.
December 7
4:46pm – Poker Stars is disabling the use of their PayTru Visadebit card. Withdraws from Poker Stars to the Paytru account will end December 10th. Deposits to Poker Stars with the Paytru card will end December 14th. It is still unclear as to whether this was an internal decision or the option was forced to be removed. Stars is urging US players to use the echeck option instead.
J. Todd also did some good investigating in his Perspectives Weekly video. He shows how Bob Goodlatte set up a seperate account just to accept campaign contributions from the horse racing industry which is no longer directly in his name. It’s called the “Good Fund”. That part is at the end of the video.
December 6
3:13pm – The claims of the Annenberg study which concluded that stats on college age online poker players (18-22 age division) declined from 5.8% to 1.5% are flawed according to industry experts. Keith White of the National Council of Problem Gambling says the only thing the UIGEA did was make access to these sites “temporarily” difficult. He predicts that if a study is done again in 2008 the percentages will rise again. He also believes that participation in online poker is exceeding pre-UIGEA levels at the current state. I’d say that’s damning evidence that online poker isn’t going anywhere when the NCPG is arguing against the UIGEA and its potential effectiveness.
December 4
12:01pm – Instead of doing a site traffic analysis this month I thought it would be interesting to look at Google search trends for the “Big 4″ sites, Pokerstars, Full tilt poker, Party poker and Absolute poker.
Here are the side by side trends according to Google. As you can see, Party Poker is still declining for “.com” related searches. This doesn’t mean they are declining in “google.de” or other extension searches. They still look sad with the decline but it’s amazing how many searches they still get. Still # 1 in Google searches for their name. Full tilt poker is suprisingly getting searched more than Poker Stars despite them having nowhere near the player volume. Lastly, Absolute Poker is down there with a large spike not too long ago…..I wonder what that is from (cheating scandal maybe)? 
December 3
4:08pm – Poker Stars seems to be ramping up their echeck option again. They’ve rolled out the option to more players and now offer a bonus just to use the option. Here is the new pop-up you get when you log-in. It’s kind of interesting that Pokerstars.com is the only site that knows how to allow echecks.
There has been a lot of talk the past week about Mitch Garber, CEO of Partygaming, reversing sales of 3.5 million shares of his stock. There is tons of speculative stories circulating and here is my opinion on the matter.
There is really no need for him to sell any shares of his stock. Online gambling in other countries is taking off just as planned and they’ve rolled out multiple universal language software platforms for their casinos and poker rooms.
When Party Poker first decided to cut off US players they said they were going to find a legal way to again allow US players to play at Party Poker. Heck, I’m surprised they haven’t deployed a fully legal form of online poker, like Duplicate poker which has no deposit restriction on credit cards. Hardcore poker players will never play at a site like Duplicate Poker but surprisingly enough quite a few people are actually downloading DP. With Party Poker’s database and continuing US traffic it’s almost idiotic that they don’t generate some income from something like this from their US database of players without having to sell customers to competing sites.
That along with the positive outlook on the US online poker market, I can see why he decided to change his mind.
