Last Thursday after accidentally eating an entire box of cereal, I headed to McKinney for a Texas Holdem tournament. I was greeted with a plastic party cup topped with home-brew beer and all-you-can-eat bratwurst. After meeting the competition we sat to a kitchen table, paid the entry fee and got to ragging on a guy who was heading to jail after the tournament to serve a weekend sentence for an unpaid handicap parking violation.
When we’d finally exhausted our seemingly endless supply of prison jokes, conversation returned to poker. Yeah, we’d all been playing for a while and we’d all done pretty well for ourselves, especially online. Most of us even had friends who have had successful careers playing online poker. That is, until it was banned in the U.S. I realized I’d never found the full story on what could quite easily be a popular misconception so I thought I’d exercise a bit of due diligence and see if I couldn’t debunk this income-limiting, potentially misconstrued poker-table wives tale.
A quick Google search for “online poker” turns up WSOP, raketherake, wikipedia (never fails), and partypoker. A quick scroll through Wikipedia to the Legality section reveals the following disappointing (old) news:
On October 13, 2006, President Bush officially signed into law the SAFE Port Act, a bill aimed at enhancing security at U.S. ports. Attached to the Safe Port Act was a provision known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). According to the UIGEA, “unlawful internet gambling” means to place, receive, or otherwise knowingly transmit a bet or wager by means of the internet where such bet is unlawful under any law in the State in which the bet is initiated, received, or otherwise made. Thus, the UIGEA prohibits online gambling sites from performing transactions with American financial institutions. As a result of the bill, several large publicly traded poker gaming sites such as PartyPoker.com, PacificPoker.com and bwin closed down their US facing operations.
So it looks like Americans are out of luck. Thanks again Bush! Fortunately our foreign readers still have an exciting opportunity to win (or losing) quite a bit of money from the peace and safety of their own pajamas. If you’re interested, Party Poker seems to be the favorite. If you’re going to join the fun at Party Poker, check out the $500 Welkomstbonus at the Flemish site and don’t forget to check out raketherake which claims to save up to 50% of the rake at Party Poker. And last but not least, if you’re trying to make money, get educated and leave emotion at the door.
The strong point in poker is never to lose your temper, either with those you are playing with or, more particularly, with the cards. There is no sympathy in poker. Always keep cool. If you lose your head you will lose all your chips. – William J. Florence
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