September 2008 US Poker News

For recent news visit the us poker sites main page.

Sept 30

4:56pm – Today the google penalty was corrected, fixed, whatever you want to call it for our site, at least on this google datacenter http://64.233.187.99. We now rank for our own name and related keywords! Pokersourceonline, cardschat, and launchpoker seem to have fully recovered as well. The bloggers…..not so much as my initial look shows they are still under the penalty for “selling” the links. Im going to have a drink now.

Sept 29

3:00am – A couple more casinos have opted to change the domain extension for their casinos. The following casinos have asked affiliates to change their domains to a .co.uk domain name. The casinos are riverbelle, jackpotcity, luckynugget and kingneptunescasino. These casinos are on the Microgaming network and have been listed on Kentucky’s (141 seized domain list) and accept players from the US except for 11 states.

Sept 26

8:14pm – The hearing seemed to go over well today. A quote from the PPA sums things up. “We got continuance. We have permissive standing. We are back in court October 6 or 7. No forfeiture. This is a short term win!” Continuance basically means they were given a postponement of the hearing in the interest of justice. Permissive standing I believe just means the lawyers for the online casinos showed that there sufficient harm would be caused by the ruling and thus the judge granted a delay until October 7th. The only site to give in so far seems to be Goldencasino which will be blocking Kentucky citizens from playing at their casino and also possibly paying fines as well. Any site that gives in, in my opinion is doing great injustice as it sets a bad presedence for future states to just do the same.

2:14pm – Negotiations talks are already underway between the online poker sites and casinos whom face their domains being seized and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. According to a short forbes article written two hours ago, it seems as if Kentucky wants the site owners to pay an “unspecified amount” and to stop letting people from Kentucky play at their site. The hearing is about to start at 3:30 EDT to see if the seizures are to be permanent (they are currently temporarily seized). Even Godaddy will be there to file an objection to the court.

Sept 25

7:07pm – The third domain has been seized by Kentucky. This time it is Goldencasino.com. The new registrants, Common Wealth of Kentucky, Michael Brown. The owners of Goldencasino have already taken the Bodog action and are telling affiliates to change their links to “newGoldencasino.com”. This is just simply amazing! When the UIGEA went it effect two years ago Golden Casino was the new site that sprang up and took over all the existing Golden Palace Casino players.

2:03pm – Club USA Casino seems to be falling victim to the Kentucky domain forfeiture. Club USA is asking all affiliates to change links to the .net version of their site stating, “Due to recent events in the state of Kentucky, we have decided to move our www.clubusacasino.com domain to www.clubusacasino.net.“ Also the owners of casinous.com and crazyvegascasino.com are telling affiliates they will be moving to the .co.uk extension. Casinous.co.uk….now that’s an oxy-moron. Tomorrow will be very interesting to see how this all plays out. According to domainnamenews.com Godaddy will not hand over any domains registered through them.

Sept 24

9:14pm – The Kentucky State domain forfeiture hearing has been changed to this Friday at 3:30pm.

3:54pm – This whole Kentucky State domain seizure is really strange. If you haven’t heard basically the Commonwealth of Kentucky is holding a hearing tomorrow to seize 141 domains, including the likes of Full Tilt, and Poker Stars. I spent all morning reading up on different articles so instead of giving you my take I’ll just list the important points or quotes I found from different articles. But from a non-legal perspective I can’t see this ever happening as it would cause such a GLOBAL uproar from people.

List of 141 domains attempted to be seized are listed here.
Despite saying they are targeting sites that service US customers, non-US accepted sites like Goldenpalace are on the list!
Not only are they targeting some non-US accepted sites but they are targeting domains that don’t have wagering ex: Microgaming.com
Supposedly two domains have already been seized, highrollerslounge.com and luckypyramidcasino.com from the domain registrar “Enom”.
According to the Guardian.co.uk, Pokerstars is sending lawyers to the US and are “expected to argue the Kentucky courts have no jurisdiction over dotcom domain names registered overseas.“ In the same article it says the registrars for the domain Pokerstars.com have an action plan which consists of disregarding the requests. Fulltilt’s registrar didn’t comment in the article. This full article can be read here.
The PPA said that they hope to have 13,000 Kentuckians to rally against this.
iMEGA will be flying to Kentucky today according to a Gambling911 article. “In exercising this standing, iMEGA has assembled what may be one of the most talented, experienced, and certainly well-respected white-collar defense teams in the country, BAR NONE.,” iMEGA reassured.

Sept 23

3:30 am – I received an email the other day from the marketing director of Pic-Club asking to revise the review of their services. If you remember we did a review of their deposit option when they first came out and talked to the owner….almost a year ago I want to say? Anyway, it looks like they’ve completely redesigned the previously complicated process and made it way simpler. Basically now they charge you $1 per deposit and that goes into a “shares” account which you earn interest on. The only drawback I still see is the 5% credit card charge to deposit…but that’s not really that big of a deal. Here is more on the revised review of Pic-club if you’re interested. If only they would add some bigger rooms they might be a force.

Sept 19

7:16pm – More bad news for US poker players who play at Bodog. Citing, “loss of withdraw and deposit options” for US players they have increased their fees for Money Transfers. This is, without a doubt the largest amount of fees I have seen in the industry. No longer can you get 1 free withdraw per month and instead they charge $40 for a $100-$200 withdraw, $50 for a $200-$500 withdraw, $80 for a $500-1000 withdraw, and $150 for anything above that. That’s just awful.

On the flip side Pokerstars.com is running promotions to get the word out about the Poker Players Alliance and is holding a “PPA Membership Drive”. There are four $3000 freerolls being held tomorrow. Nothing special considering up to 15,000 entrants can enter but it’s always good to see the sites pushing for more awareness especially after our small victory this week. If I were Pokerstars or Full Tilt I’d be sending some serious dough at the PPA considering how well this new bill would work out for any US accepted site. HR6870 is literally the perfect scenario for them, more so than anything else especially since Pokerstars.com has free instant echecks and all that.

Sept 17

4:09 am – Here is our short article on what transpired yesterday if you missed it. I also want to say thanks to the PPA for all they’ve done and trash talk they’ve endured over the past two years. Hopefully things continue on track.

Sept 16

8:27 pm – The bill (see below) passed today with a 30-19 vote! Now onto the House and Senate where it hopefully gets attached to some unrelated legislation and goes through as a rider bill and becomes law…..right back at you Frist. I also added the bill to the proposed bill watch list in section IX.

2:10 pm – They are now on the third bill. There are 5 bills in total and HR 6870 will likely be the last. Here is the (session now over, link dead) live link to the webcast. Ours should be up soon.

1:49 am – The House Financial Services will vote on HR6870, “The Payments System Protection Act” today. As you’re probably aware by now this bill would prohibit the Federal Reserve from publishing regulations to block poker transactions and clarify that sportsbetting transactions are what should be blocked (basically putting a nutcracker on the UIGEA). If the bill passes I imagine any attempt by the Federal Reserve to push their final release of the UIGEA regulations out will be put on hold. Hopefully that happens, the bill passes tomorrow and we get it thrown on as a rider bill just like the UIGEA was and it becomes law. Anyways here is the link to the page where you will be able to watch the webcast today at 1:00pm est.

Sept 13

6:11 am – Here is the last couple days recap. Overall some interesting stuff happening. The PPA yesterday introduced the Payment Systems Protection Act of 2008. Similar to the previous bill which failed barely (32-32 vote), this bill will define what is legal and illegal internet gambling. John Pappas of the PPA is saying that the House Financial Committee might announce a markup of this bill today to be held on Sept 16.

Partygaming is once again facing legal troubles. This time it’s for big money to the sum of $287 million, yikes. Not a good thing for a company trying to rebuild after the UIGEA fallout. The whole thing revolves around trademark infringement.

Also I spoke to the head casino affiliate manager yesterday at Bodog. He said the whole rumor about them pulling out of the US is a complete joke. The previous layoffs just involved slimming down of certain parts of the company that were no longer profitable. Unfortunately I just read at G911 that people are still having trouble with checks bouncing and thus causing credit problems because of it. There was mention of new processors for Bodog during our talk but they’ve been saying that for ages now so I honestly have no hope for that. It would be great if Bodog got their act together as I’ve personally always liked the company.

Sept 9

3:33 am – Im back! After a good 2 weeks of semi-being off surfing and hanging out there’s a bit to catch up on. I read today that Party Poker had to cut 320 employees because of “unfair competition” by sites that aren’t bailing because of the UIGEA. People are also filing class action law suits against Vanguard Group because they invested in “illegal gambling” sites like Party Poker and have such lost a lot of money. Now that’s a joke if you ask me. I won’t say much more about that subject as Im not a big Party Poker fan.

An online cashout/deposit recap goes as follows: Withdraws at Fulltiltpoker.com are taking about 7 days via check. Bodog is still having problems with check withdraws taking over 40 days for some people. No gripes with Pokerstars.com cashouts so Im assuming everything is koshur.

iMEGA also has a new team member who is supposedly being called a “heavy weight” in the legal department. His name is Stephen Saltzburg and will help challenge the UIGEA in the 3rd distrist court of appeals. Oddly enough this attorney was the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the U.S. DOJ.

Sept 6

1:48am – Online casino advisory is reporting that Barney Frank told the press that he expects to see an overturn of the UIGEA in 2009 under a Democratic controlled Congress.

1:33am – This post is for webmasters, bloggers or site owners in general. I just noticed by doing a random search for a few affiliate site names (pokerlistings, reviewpokerrooms, pokerjunkie, pokernews) that when you do a google search the Title of the page does not show like it used to. For example: Pokerlistings has a title of “Online poker sites toplists & bonuses…..) but when searched for (pokerlistings) you simply get “Pokerlistings” as the title. The only reason I mention this is because before my site was penalized by google the same thing happened, and still happens. Except now you have to search (Compatiblepoker.com) just to find our site, and it relays “Compatiblepoker.com” as the page title. I haven’t been following the poker world or SEO world the past week so I could be off on this. The waves have just been too good here in Florida because of hurricane Hannah to do work. I’ll hopefully have an industry recap tomorrow for the week on things I missed relating to any US situations.

Sept 3

3:02pm - I heard some disturbing news today regarding Bodog. A casino manager that has an office building where Bodog does confirmed the rumors of a possible pullout. He said his source was pretty high up with Bodog and that they had plans to leave after football season. Reason being, nobody will do processing with them. So unless things changed with that regards it’s not looking good.

Sept 2

1:31am – Turns out Pokerstars.com is back in the Google search results for (poker) (online poker) (poker stars) etc. From my readings it sounds like some dummy on their seo team accidently placed code that would keep the homepage from being crawled by Google, either that or they pissed off the wrong employee. Despite only lasting a couple days, they lost a lot of money, not that they can’t afford it.