You know, to be fair, if the US had never put regulations out there like the UIGEA, and just let the poker sites go, Black Friday never happens, the sites with the best reputations rise to the top (e.g Pokerstars) and even FTP would have remained solvent while being horribly mismanaged.

All we needed was some clarifying statement in the U.S. that online poker was legal and the floodgates would have opened. Instead, we had 5 years of gray area, which most normal people thought was actually black, up until April 15, 2011 (sigh).

So saying we'd be stuck with FTP and AP/UB, well, if they (FTP) hadn't had to start sliding down the slippery slope because of the UIGEA, I believe FTP would have generally been fine, and anyone with half a brain avoided AP/UB after the first scandal.

For most poker players (and by extension, sites) reputation is all you really have, and staining it, even accidentally or unintentionally, can take an awful awful long time to clean up. Honor system is pretty large in the poker world, even through the anonymous nature of the internet, and when a site ****s up, they pay the price, just like players do.

tl;dr Ron Paul, in this particular instance, is definitely our friend, and having no regulation at all for the internet and for online poker, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The FTP scandal didn't happen because of BF and it didn't happen because of "mismanagement". It happened because we put trust into a group of outright thieves. Thus, it was inevitable. Stop trying to defend them.

You guys are acting like poker economy in the is US is great right now. There are only 3 sites to play on and it takes 3 months to get your money. What about this do you want to keep?

Even if the UIEGA was repealed, those major companies you guys keep naming like Facebook and Google will not just start offering real money games. They would be too afraid of having their assets seized by individual states, tribes,or having other laws be re-interpreted. You will still be stuck with shady companies like FT, Cake, Bodog, etc. PS is never coming back, they are under indictment. My guess is party poker and 888, etc won't come back either until its clarified more - simply repealing the UIEGA isn't enough. We need regulation to protect the players.

1) How are you going to punish them criminally and civily when there severs are in Malta or on some reservation. If this was true then people from UB would be in jail. Poker has been unregulated for years and no one has ever gone to jail for cheating their customers.

2) You say people would leave the site if they aren't trusted. Your giving players WAAY to much credit. There was a multi-million dollar scandal on UB and it was still the 3rd most popular site in the world. It is laughable if you think people would leave a site if they had a un-trustworthy auditor but when it turns out you can see the hole cards that isn't enough to leave the site?

This by far the best explanation of Libertarianism I have seen on this forum. Thank you. I wish more people understood these concepts and were not mislead by the social and mainstream media. I think this post would have a 99% chance to change a lot of people's minds about the election and general path this country is following.

The market was driven underground by govt, and therefore there were only a handful of poker sites. This monopoly-like environment has problems expected of monopolies (higher prices, low quality, fraud, etc.) No one is defending them. It's just like the housing bubble... which was the cause of govt incentivizing banks to make bad loans by guaranteeing their loans. Do you blame the banks? Or do you blame the govt, which was source? The same goes for black friday.

Poker hasn't been unregulated. It's been an underground business since UIGEA. In a free market system, players would largely choose to play on sites that were located in reputable countries that enforced fraud laws. This is why poker downsized so much after UIGEA. Lots of people stopped playing because they didn't want to deposit on some site based in the Caribbean or Isle of Man that was regulated by some indian tribe. And they didn't want to deposit on some site that didn't accept credit cards and didn't pay out with checks from US-based banks. Players do have some concern for where their money goes, even in an emotion, greed, addiction filled business like online poker.

Yes, but they were a distant 3rd. The reason it stayed afloat, as you pointed out, is because fish didn't do much research in choosing their poker site, and winning players followed the fish. They had much softer games compared to FTP/Stars, entirely due to the scandal... this is a key point. Poker's business model is unique because the customer base thrives on unintelligent customers (fish). If players weren't incentivized to stay on UB b/c of the high % of fish, then UB would have been punished for fraud by its customers much harder. And they would have been punished more if poker had more of a free market environment: more and better regulated poker sites, and more informed customers.

What you are advocating is for some govt regulatory agency to be put in charge of enforcing rules on poker companies in order to prevent fraud and bad behavior because consumers can't do it. This is an honorable goal, but it never works. The same thing happened with investors in Madoff's ponzi scheme. They said there's no need to do their own research because the SEC is doing it. The SEC gave Madoff the green light to fleece his investors. The SEC has no incentive to do a good job in preventing fraud.

A free market regulated poker environment isn't a utopia. There are always going to be a couple shady and fraudulent companies. This is life. The solution is not govt regulation, as tagtastic pointed out. That only creates less informed consumers, and serves to increase, not decrease, the ability of companies to commit fraud. If the customer base can't do it's own due diligence due to lack of resources, then there will be an incentive for a private company to do this for them at a profit. Just like Consumer Reports or Underwriters Laboratories.

If sites were lawful when UIGEA passed, UIGEA wouldn't apply. Since they never were lawful, UIGEA did apply and it is incorrect to imply it caused them to go 'underground'.