Quote:
Originally Posted by yellowfever
Yeah there's sites where players can make a living currently. Michigan legal poker will be like the other states. Except ran by local casinos.
Gotta admit he's got a pretty valid point. Without some kind of state-compacts and legalized states pressuring other states that are currently on the fence(like your neighbors here in IL
), the whole state-by-state strategy is actually leaving many poker players worse off for indefinite amounts of time. Blackouts and ring-fencing are simply unacceptable. There's a 13-page PPA document to the PA General Assembly with 0 mention of the need for compacts/shared player pools, yet they spend their first page or two highlighting offshore sites and throwing them under the bus.
One of the worst things the PPA could do right now is draw even more negative government attention to the offshore sites for pretty much 0 net gains, I mean seriously come on put some thought into it next time(or better yet, maybe get some real online poker players in the PPA). Yes the Lock/FullFlush scandals hurt, but those were a very small part of overall online traffic (understandably, your writers left that fact out) and it's common sense in the online poker community not to leave a huge part of your roll on such small/obscure sites...especially for extended periods of time.
And then seeing Rich lol at the offshore sites is kinda disappointing to see. I figured him and the PPA would defend bitcoin and the increasingly P2P online poker player pools for a number of reasons, but mainly just on principle alone lol. They may not be perfect, but hey it's at least something for now. And they can be quite competitive sometimes, so they provide many good examples for future legal sites to follow. Things like which game formats/rake structures/promotions etc. seem to work and which ones simply don't.
Also (even if you strongly disagree with these sites) it's interesting to note that most of the offshore sites/skins have merged their player pools as much as possible into a few main pools that compete for customers. When crafting legislation regarding legal online poker, lawmakers should take careful note of this. The legal sites will need access to as large of a player pool as possible and at least 3 main operators...no amayastars monopoly with a couple tiny sites tied to some random casino.