LeeMobile

So you may or may not have heard, but online poker has probably collapsed under the weight of conservative fundamentalists down south.  Tucked in a “port security” bill, all forms of online gambling in the US are now illegal.  Online gambling is now grouped up under the same felony group as distributing and storing child pornography… OUCH!

I’m not sure how American politics works exactly, but from what I’ve heard the bill was passed quite undemocratically. The main bill itself is to improve security against terrorist attacks, the bill was ammended after it was vote on but before it was to be made law (before it was signed by George dubbya) to include a passage banning online gambling.  The official reason being that online gambling sites were tools for terrorists to transport and funnel money in and out of the US.

This bill was signed a few weeks ago, and all the major poker withdrew their service to US citizens.  Essentially, 85% of online poker users have vanished from the virtual tables.

Even though I’m Canadian, this news does affect me.  Poker is sort of like an ecosystem of its own, especially in the online world.  All the poor players get gobbled up by bigger fish, and in turn the bigger fish get eaten up by other fish or sharks.  As long as the stream of fresh minnows continues to flow, then the whole ecosystem is happy.  Now that the source has been cut off, the level of skilled players will start to dominate the lesser players.

Basically, it means that there’re less juicy games out there.  There goes my part-time student job :-p

I sleep happy knowing that terrorists will be having a harder time moving small amounts of money through US borders…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.