How long was this house arrest though? Still sounds like an amazingly low sentence, which in this case sounds great, caus the guy was not stealing anyone money or smt like the ftp crew did.

Good outcome then

Complete inference on my part, but I'm guessing the eight months since the start of this thread. According to Haley Hintze's update on PokerTube in March (at the time of the plea), he was extradited to the U.S. on January 17, arraigned that day, then released on a $1 million bond. The house arrest would have begun then, and I don't see any reason why there would have been a stoppage.

There's a funny little mention in Hintze's story that his house arrest is "effectively little more severe than the shelter-in-place order currently affecting millions of New York City residents." So yeah, for at least some of the last eight months, his situation was that of someone not on house arrest. (At least, that's the glass-half-full version of it.)

OK. Point taken.
Also, your map is not correct. U.S. has no extradition agreement (nor much of anything else) with Cuba.

Yours truly
DB Cooper

Since the yanks love extraditing so much; maybe they could send us anne sacoolas!

I had no doubt that he had an arrangement ahead of time before turning himself in which is essentially the problem with why rich people can get away with nearly anything...

But in this case I'm glad that he's a free man and I truly think Justice was served because I don't think he really committed a crime.
I wish him the very best of luck with the rest of his life.

I don't think this is the case at all: My understanding from the reporting when he was arrested in Switzerland at the start of the year (my god! what an eternity ago!) was that he wasn't expecting to be arrested in Switzerland.

I don't think he was expecting to be arrested.

But he might still be in Switzerland today if he didn't come to some form of agreement with US authorities before boarding the plane to New York. At the very least he had a deal to never see the inside of a jail cell.

I'd like to nominate Hilly Erlich

Great result. He doesn't need the money or headache, but hopefully he does something with online poker once again. Just his name alone would attract a loyal following.

Apparently he initial fought the extradition proceedings, but ultimately conceded and voluntarily flew to NY after a tentative deal had been reached with prosecutors.

I'll join in the wishes. I always felt that Isai was fair, ran a well managed site and tried his best to keep a symbiotic relationship with its most regular clients, us the players.

Very much unlike Amaya who lie and rob (SNE), cut every possible corner (security and support) and generally speaking, don't have a fundamental understanding of the business they're running.

I'd love to be there when he enters the Amazon room for the first time. He'd prefer to keep it low key, but no doubt it'll cause a stir in the room.

Hi Brother:

What bothers me about all of this is that if Isai only got time served and a $30,000 fine, which is essentially nothing, it doesn't sound like he did much, if anything, wrong. Yet look at all the damage that was done to the poker industry and to poker players.

Best wishes,
Mason

Mason,

Isai was still in charge of Stars when they had to pay a fine of over $700m.
Are you saying the ‘damage’ was Black Friday? If so, Black Friday wouldn’t have happened if FT and Stars had done the same as Party and pulled out of the US market, but ‘Black Friday’ would’ve instead been an event in 2006 and online poker would’ve died.

I think they took the $700m into account when they chose his $30,000 fine. #fineserved
If anything, Isai did the opposite of damage and you owe him a debt of appreciation. He saved 2+2.

Hi Pete:

I think you misunderstood my post. I'm not saying that Isai did damage.

Also, while I never met Isai in person, we did have a number of phone conversations, and he did help 2+2 in a number of ways.

Best wishes,
Mason

You spewed nonsense, sorry.

Party paid $300 million because its owner was facing family pressure, AND it later pulled out of the US market because it was a public company at the time. It lost billions in market cap on the AIM in London under its new CEO, Mitch Garber, it fled the US market rather than challenge the UIGEA in court.

Stars and Tilt seized the moment in 2006 and grew large on the US business.

Ya, Black Friday was what really made Stars boom, and Dikshit, that's his name, had to bail with his hands up.

What I don’t understand is why voluntarily pull out of the US post-indictment if he was set up in a location where American cops couldn’t touch him for all those years. I was under the impression that he had cut some sort of deal where if he blocked US players from Stars and covered Full Tilt, the DOJ wouldn’t pursue their case against him. If they were going to arrest/extradite him at the first opportunity anyways, why not just keep things running like they had been? Why bow in to their pressure if it wasn’t going make his American legal problems go away?

He more or less did get away, in relative terms. So there's that.

They pulled out of the US and paid FT for their own benefit to try and get rid of their bad actor status and get into the US in the future. Isai also knew they'd come for him at some point so he was just trying to look good. It's all about turning any bad acting into good acting for future operations or cases.

Got away relative to who? As far as I know, no one has ever gotten more than the proverbial slap on the wrist for online poker related charges. I can’t understand why no one locates themselves in a jurisdiction hostile to foreign law enforcement and set up a site with a restriction-free global player pool. The advent of crypto makes moving money so much easier these days. I think a big problem with the overall online poker economy is that no one site can reach a critical mass of fish. There are plenty of people out there that don’t care about learning enough about a game to beat it. They just want that rush of gambling. The trick is getting enough of them in one place. Once you can fill the small stakes games with deranged button-clickers, everything else will fall into place. Anyone who puts in any effort whatsoever will be out of those stakes very quickly, and player pools will get weaker right up through all the stakes as a result.

What?
UIGEA coming into force and Black Friday are not the same thing. Had Stars and FT pulled out when Party did, there wouldn’t have been a government shutdown of those sites.
When I say ‘Black Friday’ would’ve happened earlier, I mean US players would’ve had nowhere significant to play from Sept 2006, not April 2011.

Ye, facepalm. I meant UIGEA.

I still don't think Stars saved online poker by continuing to serve US customers tho. They weren't the only people in that space at the time and because it was still pretty much the poker boom then people will of found there way to whoever was still serving US customers.

I get what you’re saying, but if Party, Stars, Full Tilt and AP/UB all stopped in the US at the same time, it would’ve taken a long time for other sites to get traction IMO. There wouldn’t have been Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker would’ve only had 2 seasons.

Your assumptions are absurd.