2008 May US Poker News
Recent changes can be found on our US poker webpage.
May 28 8:15pm – There are two news stories just coming out. One involves Betonsports and monies owed to customers, and the other is the US/Antigua WTO agreements. I’ll break down both articles as they are pretty long.
The Antigua Sun reported that the US and Antigua could only be days away from a settlement over the gaming dispute. In the article Cort, the Minister of Finance for Antigua said he met with lots of high powered officials and was optimistic over these meetings. He expects an agreement to be made before June 6th. Here is the full article.
The liquidators of Betonsports gave an update as to customers monies owed and what they expect to happen as things proceed. Basically the liquidators said Betonsports was insolvent, short for unable to pay their debts because of lack of money. Their assets were $10 million and liabilities were $27 million. It goes on to say players are owed an estimated $16 million which was included in the liabilities, good news for those owed money. The liquidators plan on trying to get back another $8 million from outstanding debt from bettors. Pretty ironic huh, they owe players $16 million and are after some bettors for bad debt. Ok, so what you really want to know is….will you get your money back and will it be in full? The liquidators say they still don’t know the date or cents to the dollar that players will get back. After the liquidators fees and bad debt they’ll never recover I can’t see how they’ll pay every player back ALL the money owed. They finished with this quote.
“We cannot currently estimate the timing and value of any distribution which may ultimately be returned to the players/creditors.”
12:52am – Ok so the funds have completely been depleted from the competition. Those who emailed in corrections but didn’t include their PS account ID please do so for your $20 (3 people). I appreciate all the help in this. As I said from the beginning of building this page, I was going to need a lot of help from the people out there to keep up with things. Over the last year and a half I’ve gotten so many great emails from the average poker player to some very higher ups in the gaming industry and I appreciate every single email. Tomorrow it’s back to business as usual. Hopefully someone will turn their $20 into something bigger.
May 27
8:53am – Wow, you guys found some good errors that I never would have noticed, including some sites that went out of business etc. All good stuff even the spelling errors. Right now there is $110 left out of the $450 to give away. Remember to include your pokerstars screen name so I can send the $20 off quickly and so I dont forget. Everyone did a pretty good comb through so I imagine errors are going to be hard to find now.
May 26
8:16pm – In light of Memorial Day and our 1 billion visitors to this page I’m going to do something a little different today. I have $450 sitting in my PokerStars account that I want to give away. Anyone to find a major error on this page will get $20 transferred to them. It can be as simple as a site listed in the “US accepted spot” that is no longer supposed to be there, or a missing deposit option, to something bigger…..like a mispelling. 
I will run this until all $450 has been given out. All errors must be found above the “archived hourly updates”. Email me at inf o AT compatiblepoker.com with any errors you might have found. Please use subject line “Roger”.
May 24
10:26pm – J. Todd did some interviews in his Perspectives Weekly video this week. The one that pertains to poker players is the one with John Pappas of the Poker Players Alliance discussing the new PPA website. If you’re a casino affiliate for gamblingwages there is also a good interview in there with the new manager. Congratulations J.T. on the 1 million video views. You still got a long way to match our 1 billion + page views of this page. 
Also this week we gained more cosponsors for the bill HR5767 which would put a stop to the creation of the regulations for the UIGEA. The total is now 18. It was a slow week so there’s really no need for a weekly recap, so I’m off to watch the UFC fight.
May 23
12:01am – An organization called the Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit this week which is pursuing to sue the goverment. They are doing so over the WTO dispute in which the US government refuses to release details to Americans about the billions in concessions given to the European Union. This is now the second set of people to demand this information be released in which they consider it illegal, last month it was Barney Frank and Ron Paul.
Also, on a general online poker status quo, some major sites that didn’t have Moneygram as a withdraw method now do. They are just renaming it to something else. Full Tilt at this time is not one to be doing this but <
Pokerstars.com is. It has become the fastest withdraw method ever since echeck cashouts slowed down dramatically.
May 22
3:38am – This is actually the first I heard of it but Pokerstars is opening up their own brick and mortar poker room in Macau. It opens up tomorrow. It looks as if they are building brand awareness in Asia to hopefully capitalize even further in the online market place, although I’m still not all that aware of online gaming laws in China. I always thought they were very strict. The new site is pokerstarsmacau.com.
May 21
12:03am – The Poker Players Alliance has redesigned their website. Personally I liked the old one better. I’m not really sure why they redesigned the site but from a webmaster’s perspective they did make it more Search Engine friendly. Other than that they added advertisements which I have no problem with. Just more money for the cause. On a side note I read that the WPT stock has fallen 70% because of the UIGEA according to thestockmasters.com…..ouch. Oh yeah, I called our friends at the DOJ the other day about the Neteller cofounders. They’re STILL awaiting sentencing. The press office actually had to call me back about the status because it’s been so long since they were arrested.
May 17
9:50pm - J. Todd covers the Washington State court case in this weeks video
May 16
3:05am -A third major site has joined the echeck bandwagon. Absolutepoker just released a “soft launch” of a poker echeck option. It, like Full Tilt is only available for some players. See review of what other sites accept poker echecks.
2:47am – The Lee Rousso case for Washington State gamblers did not go good this week. We straight up lost as the judge said it was not unconstitutional. It remains a felony for any person to gamble online in Washington State.
May 15
8:55am – In the ongoing iMEGA case to put a temporary restraining order on the UIGEA there has been word of a new attorney in the defence of the US DOJ. His name is Nicholas Bagley. The next case is to be at the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
12:55am – There was an interesting article in the associated press that said Las Vegas is hurting because of the “recession”. In the past gambling has proven to be recession proof. The article claims that because gambling has become mainstream it is now more vulnerable to economic conditions. It is true gambling has become somewhat mainstream and I agree with the article to a point. In the past couple years people got flooded with gambling especially from television and almost everyone had a poker / casino account while the economy was booming. Now that gambling is just another normal activity to so many more people, bad economic conditions have such an impact. Of course the article relates to Brick and Mortar casinos. Online gaming sites will always capitalize because they are global and can move around so easily, which is why we continue to see a rise in gambling online despite what may be happening domestically.
May 14
1:40am – A few months ago Primapin (a prepaid deposit option) was gaining some traction at casinos and sportsbooks. Lately it’s being removed from a lot of Sportsbooks and even some casinos are now having trouble processing deposits with it. The only poker site to use it, and still have it is Doylesroom.com
May 12
11:17am – Pokerstars is still having problems with their echeck cashouts. But there is a plus to this. It seems Pokerstars is giving players 20% of any amount they tried to cashout as an unrestricted bonus for cashouts delayed from April 14 – May 10.
Pokerstars.com is expecting the problem to be fixed by tomorrow but no promises. That’s pretty good damage control either way. I’m not sure if there is a limit on echeck cashouts but if you did the max it’ll turn out to be a nice little reward for having to wait.
Meanwhile in other countries, the Netherlands will face UIGEA style laws cracking down on internet gambling, announced this weekend. Dutch banks will be forced to block transactions to at least 45-50 prominent gaming sites.
May 10
10:12pm – J. Todd released his “edited” version of his video. Sounds like he got in a bit of trouble with one of the casino operators. Anyway the one thing he mentioned that kind of stood out was the announcement of The American Gaming Association’s decision to stay neutral on the UIGEA. The CEO believes regulation is 7-8 years away, which I personally agree with even though J. Todd does not. I just find it disturbing that while they (the AGA) believe regulation will occur, they don’t have the balls to stand up for us now to speed things up.
May 9
8:14am – Mastercard is really taking a stand against gambling transactions. They are literally going through and finding merchants that use their services for gambling deposits and restricting them. This is hurting the US online casinos more so than poker. They’re definitely becoming active though. Online gaming companies have already begun to circumvent this which I wasn’t given much details on, nor do I want to know how they do it.
May 7
2:26am – Players on various forums are reporting delayed cashouts at both Poker Stars and Full Tilt. This has happened before so hopefully it gets resolved quickly and isn’t a negative sign of things to come. Sorry for the lack of posting the past few days but I’ve got some wicked cold.
