the first thing that pops out to me is the 30 million liscencing fee. That is a lot of money for a poker site in California. You better be damn sure your going to make 30 million if you are going to try and open one up.

Also as far as the chances of this bill passing. I don't pretend to know but here are the factors that would be included in that.

The Senate majority leader is a Dem and they hold majorities in both houses and the governorship. These are not super majorities though so keep in mind that a few dems going the other way could make this a no. BUT even if that rare case were the actual case the reps got boned in redistricting and Dems will have super majorities in both the senate and house most likely next year.

Another bigger factor going for this is that California has had a huge budget shortfall for a while and they keep cutting education. Its widely accepted that voters have had enough of this and say more taxes rather then cutting education at this point. That kind of mindset will make this a very popular thing for legislators to get passed so that the budget shortfall will narrow without doing either of these things.

Questions (sorry if they're answered):

1) When will this be voted on and how long until it's officially passed?

2) IIRC provisional licenses will be given. How long would it take to draft a provisional license?

3) How long would it take to attain a provisional license after legislation is passed, and therefore deal the first hand?

It's very close, and the winery case itself came down to a one vote ruling, but in that case the States didn't block all unlicensed wine distributors, they blocked all out of State businesses from shipping directly to customers with no burden on intrastate shipments.

Those laws were depending on the 21st Amendment giving states authority over alcohol imports, but the instate distributors were allowed to import wine and distribute directly to consumers, making the laws discriminatory rather than regulatory.

Those wine blocking laws would have been redundant had their been a federal law in place blocking unlicensed distributors from accepting direct payments, but since the UIGEA requires a State law violation as a trigger they made unlicensed offering/play a crime.

Since the law would apply equally to an unlicensed instate gambling cafe, an offshore poker site or an unlicensed CA tribal poker site, it should be ruled non-discriminatory.

I doubt they intend to enforce the law against players, but because laws which don't extend to play have been ruled inapplicable extra-territorially (in cases involving State v Tribe), making unlicensed play a crime was probably necessary.

No one.

Right. It's a trick question. But it seemed appropriate given all the trick questions in an earlier post.

when will we find out if its passed or not?

You're overestimating how large the current unregulated sites, that have revenues in the billions, actually are. http://www.pokerscout.com/ lists the number of average ring game players online at Stars as 25,800. But a person 50 tabling counts as 50 players by their count. If the average player is playing 4 tables, which is probably on the low end given how many 10-24 tablers there are, that's an average of just 6,450 ring game players online.

Looking at a region restricted, pokerscout lists Svenska Spel as having an average of 940 players. That is likely fairly close to the actual amount of players given the lack of many multitablers on that site. California has more than 4x the population of Sweden, the country Svenska Spel is restricted to.

Even if there are numerous sites they will all be making well in excess of 30mm, especially during the initial 'boom' period.

1. The bill has to go through the normal legislative process of committee hearings and votes, floor votes and governor's signature. How quickly it proceeds will be at the discretion of the CA Congressional leaders. The new fiscal year for CA starts on July 1, so my guess is that the bill sponsors intend to get this bill through in the next 3 or 4 months.

2. Theoretically, immediately upon the bill becoming law. But they'll probably do some regulation and forms development first, plus the casinos/cardrooms/horsetracks/OTBs have to work out their alliances and deals with the site providers get their paperwork done to submit an application. I'd put this at late 4th quarter 2012 or 1st quarter 2013.

3. Obtaining a provisional license and dealing the first hand won't be simultaneous. Once the provisional license is granted (see #2), the site then has to build their system inside the state of CA, get it tested, inspected and approved by the state. This may take a few months more. First live hands dealt: late 2nd quarter 2013, imo (assuming passage of the bill this spring).

EDIT: Just noticed that I missed this provision in the bill:
So my guesstimate of first cards in the air late 2nd quarter 2013 is probably right.

The $30M is not a licensing fee. It is an advance payment against the first three years of the 10% site revenue taxes.

But yes, this is a hefty sum to invest in advance. On the other hand, if CA were an independent nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world. I think the poker sites/networks will be falling over themselves in their scramble to get a CA license (as suppliers to the CA casinos/cardrooms/horsetracks/OTBs), as it will be their best foothold into the new US regulated i-poker market.

"Should this bill not pass, it could be reintroduced as a standard bill but would not go into effect until January 1, 2013 should it pass." http://www.legalpokersites.com/blog/...ll-introduced/

We do have some outs to legislation passed in 2012 as a back up incase nonsense happens.

This article is a very good synopsis of the bill provisions. Note though that it has one error: the $30M advance payment by sites is against the first three years of the 10% site revenue tax, not against the full ten years of the duration of the site license.

Got to laugh at this ..

For those of us that block results, can we opt out at least for a monthly total. Can we adjust this for rakeback? .. Ok back to the important discussions, but results oriented thing in this Law.

^^ plz someone lobby to include "rake paid" in that popup screen

you know, to protect consumers from being taken advantage of by greedy online poker rooms.

is that not a priority?

Actually, that statement isn't totally accurate. Here is what the bill actually says:

So if Ca. pools with other states, this could get very interesting.

Winner pays rake, so I guess if the winner takes down a pot in California, he would pay X rake...If the winner is in NV, he'd pay Y rake.

In split pot games this could really stand out...One could pay a $2 rake in one state, and just $1 in another.

This is gonna open a whole new can of worms.

Thanks for the info Skall!

I wrote the article. Thank you for pointing this out. As you know from reading it, the same point is presented over and over. Although one section makes the three years clear, I mixed it up with another section earlier in the regs that was not as detailed. I have made the correction.

Thank you again,

John Mehaffey/Pokeraddict

I read that to say that at some point a player would be forced to look at this info as I doubt it will be obvious to find otherwise. The section did not describe how this would be implemented. I used the term "pop up", but it could be done some other way. I picture something similar to the PokerStars bot screen that forces you to address the question and will not let you play until you do.

could stop bots too

Tribal interests way in ..

http://www.caltba.org/news/statement...internet-poker

Definitely not a glowing endorsement, but unless the tribes get to run it all with no or minimal taxes to the state it really is not there cup of tea. Don't see them as interested in making changes to improve the bill.

So when officially do we get to let the past be the past and stop giving Indians exclusive privileges? 100 years down the road? 200? I say we do it now. They had their exclusivity and should have a huge market domination just because they have been in the market of gambling for so long.

When I saw the horse racing industry included in this I wondered how that would go over. The bill specifically mentions online horse betting sites as getting included.

TVG is legal in California and Betfair owns them. This gives Betfair the ability to enter the market without having to find a B&M partner. How many other companies would fit the profile described? I also have to guess that Betfair lobbied for this hard as this wording cannot cover too many companies. I can see how others would think that was unfair since online OTBs do not have the ability to currently offer poker.

I wonder if all of Betfair's rogue behavior would come back to haunt them when trying to get this license if it goes through as currently worded.

I guess I could be reading that wrong and it could have an entirely different meaning. I am not too familiar with how the horse racing industry works. I assume it either means traditional OTBs, online OTBs, or both.

I have long suspected that Winning Directions was hired by Betfair to run the astroturf organization Poker Voters of America and to push the i-poker bills the last few years in CA, IA and FL. PVoA did back the earlier bills introduced by Wright in CA, which were predecessors to this one. I think you are right that Betfair is one of the vested interests pushing this one.

+about 30000000trillion

NO. What you described is not how it would work at all.

First, forget about CA pooling with NV.

Next, "pooling" means a site can have a license in more than one state, and hence, accept players from multiple states. The rake would be up to the site, and won't have anything to do with which state whoever is paying it is from.

Some issues such as gaming taxes the sites have to pay would get more complicated. But the site's servers will do whatever math is involved, and it really isn't a concern of the players.