the wcoop tourneys are available to register right now and i was able to register in all of them.. even the ones after september 11th

Anyone know who is actually going to patrol online poker? As in, which body will serve as the police? If we can still play on some poker sites, who will be hunting that site and making them pay millions?

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, I believe: http://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Inte...ng-act-reforms

In reality nobody

If any regs are interested in discussing starting a poker house in NZ (preferably) in a couple months, feel free to contact me. I've been over in NZ for a few months grinding already. Let me know, cheers.

I know On The Mac said he is planning on moving to NZ

This seems right. The issue is they can't actually do anything effective. Even if they order ISPs to block the sites people will just use a VPN. They can't freeze the sites assets/arrest people etc because the sites operating have no assets in Australian jurisdictions and the owners will obviously never come here.

Soooo... yeah the exact same reasons they weren't able to shut anyone other than Poker Asia Pacific down since the original law was written :P

Awesome. So the next question, does anyone know of any sites who openly allow VPN ISPs?

What about the Saturday 9SEPT 18:00 AEST $215. think we would be able to play this one? Its a 2 dayer

In theory, was this not also the case pre black friday?

I know of friends who played on Party and Ipoker from the US with no issue for years. The only site that is actively going after VPNers is Stars as far as I know (as in actively trying to find them) but my info could be outdated. Some people get away with it on Stars but I think they're using teamviewer setups to display a legitimate IP. You'd still need to 'establish' a residence overseas though and then get a dedicated VPN for that country/area.

@Mangoball email Stars support and ask. They may be useless but they'd be able to give a better answer than us. I'm not sure if the 11th is a firm date yet and if so what time etc or if it's an estimate

To be safe I wouldn't play any multi day event that carries over to the 11th either our time or US time and plan to have your last significant buyin events finish on the 10th Australian time but Stars will be able to give a better answer than me on that.

@Aveemaria Basically, yeah, exactly. The sites that got shut down in the US had their American assets seized, or at least FTP and Stars did. They were doing stuff like trying to buy a bank to make their payment processing easier and as the FTP owners at least lived in the US their assets were there. UB basically had no money anyway as they had stolen most of it (and it turned out FTP was in a similar situation, although FTP probably never collapses without BF whereas UB was going to anyway at some stage). None of the sites offering poker in the US currently (ACR, Ignition etc) have US assets and none of the sites that'll be offering to Australian (the same two + chinese and bitcoin sites) have Australian assets either.

The reason PAP was shut down is that it was a registered Australian company with an Australian owner (Luke), Australian assets (Luke's company being incorporated here, PAP having Australian staff etc) and PAP openly paying Australian taxes etc. as (it's my understanding anyway) their lawyers had told them to do.

Basically, PAP tried to just do what Stars and co had been doing for years only do so openly from Australia as an Australian business and pay taxes on their earnings etc. and obviously that turned out to be poor legal advice that the company was operating on. I'm fairly sure that if Luke had just wrapped PAP up in shell corporations within shell corporations so ownership was unclear, incorporated it offshore or lived/taken his assets offshore and hired non-Australian staff and so on that the site would not have been shut down and there would have been nothing the government could do about that and it would still be operating today. The ridiculous this is because PAP created Australian jobs/had assets here/paid taxes here, the government was able to shut it down, which it never attempted with the offshore sites until the new legislation closed the 'grey areas'.

Theoretically speaking if Luke moved to Antigua or whatever and brought all of his assets with him out of reach of the government the site could open up again tomorrow and there would be nothing the govt could do to stop it beyond arresting Luke if he ever returned to Australia.

Obviously none of that's going to happen but hypothetically if anyone moved to a Caribbean tax haven where they had citizenship/permanent residency they could simply develop software, host the site on offshore servers and hold site funds in an offshore bank account, run ads through fb/google/etc and start a new site catering to the Australian market and there would be nothing that the government could do beyond sending them sternly worded letters and threatening to arrest the site owners if they ever went to Australia.

That's basically what the govenment will do re: ACR and Ignition, but if Calvin Ayre (I assume he owns Ignition but idk someone correct me if wrong) doesn't come to Australia or move his money here there is absolutely nothing the government can do to enforce the ban beyond asking ISPs to block the site, which could be bypassed through VPN use anyway on any site that is determined to serve the Australian market.

Isai Scheinberg is still technically wanted in the US (or was last I could recall) but if he doesn't go there or move his money there there's nothing they can do about it and morally speaking he hasn't done anything wrong so why should he take a plea deal or whatever, simply tell the DOJ to **** off and never go to America or move money through there, problem solved.

Hell, if I had no ties to Australia and didn't mind being labelled a criminal in my home country it would be pretty tempting to just move to a tax haven, establish residency/citizenship and just open a new site targeting the Australian/American markets. But I don't really want to be an international fugitive and all that, so someone else will have to do that instead.

Obviously sites that offer online poker to Australians/Americans aren't doing anything morally wrong as long as they run the site with integrity, run a fair game and pay out players when they win etc.

In any case hopefully we end up getting the committee recommendations through assuming they're favourable which they are overwhelmingly likely to be and the major sites leaving the market ends up being temporary. We still have a real chance of that, people crying online poker is dead in Australia are wrong, the long term fight is not over.

I seen this posted in the PSO section is this for play money only?

PokerStars has opted to relaunch its ‘PokerStars Play’ social gaming service in select markets around the world.

The platform features a selection of poker variants such as Texas Hold’em and Spin and Go, as well as a range of slot games, with users able to compete against professional poker players and enter tournaments.

The revamped PokerStars Play service will only be made available in the US and Australian markets during the first phase of the roll-out, although plans are in place to extend the platform to other regions over the next 12 months.

PokerStars said in a statement that PokerStars Play will be available to download and play on both iOS and Android devices.

Lloyd Melnick, director of social gaming, added: “PokerStars Play is the next phase in our progress toward being a leader in social casino.

“PokerStars Play is a unique product, taking the best of real money gaming and merging it with the features players expect from mobile games.”

Confirmation of the launch of the platform in Australia comes despite PokerStars last week announcing that it is to withdraw all of its real-money services from the country in response to new gambling regulations for remote operators.

PokerStars intends to cease all real-money operations in Australia by the middle of September.

Excellent informative reply. I'm starting to get my head around this problem I think...

So how's this for an option, I have a brother who lives in China, maybe I could play under his identity and VPN through China? Or should I find a different country?

EDIT: looks like China is a bad choice... hmmm...

2nd EDIT: can we use VPN and bitcoin combined to get around having to make a new international identity?

Let it go, it's over.... find something else to do, play live. you gave it a good shot and fell short.

It's not over, and you can get the **** out of the thread if you want to go do something else and leave things to people who are actually trying to help get good legislation passed. Yeah, the main sites are going to leave for the time being. Some unregulated sites are staying. The main sites will come back if we can get the committee findings implemented etc. which is yes, probably less than 50% but it's certainly not impossible and this thread is for people who want to further the goal of legal online poker in Australia. If you don't want to help that's fine, but get out of our thread.

I haven't played full time since 2015, this won't affect me at all personally from a financial perspective, i'll just play on Monster and SWC as i've been doing anyway for years and maybe open an Ignition account.

If you'd like to put your money where your mouth is im happy to bet on regulated and legal online poker of some form being offered to Australians by the end of 2018 at 10-1 and by 2020 at 5-1. Yeah, we suffered a setback and we're dogs now, but we're not drawing dead.

Its not an attack at you mate, and don't think i don't want everything to work out, i was supernova for ages on stars and i have as much investment in seeing it succeed as everyone here wants to, but i don't have the same faith in the Australian Government that others might, do you think it's just coincidence that as soon as this committee gathers support the legislation miraculously gets put on the next days agenda in the senate? I would never bet any money on anything to do with the Australian Government they're pathetic & illogical. ACR and ignition ..... I checked those sites out, they're crap and bitcoin is a pain, but that's just me complaining. The point is it seems like false hope, i hope i eat my words trust me but there's not much to go off. I don't want to bring peoples attitude down but it's more practical to just move countries if you can to play it. You're dedicated to the cause, which i appreciate but unless you bribe them i would put the % more like <5%.

pokerstarsluke just said in their discord channel that aussies can play all wcoop from 3rd-9th sept but anything after that we should be barred from playing. we should be able to play normal tourneys on the 10th

Absolutely. The bill effectively passed in March. We got an extra 6 months because of a minor amendment that NXT got through that the government reworded.

Plus the budget sittings delayed it even further as debate on the Gonski bill meant no other business could be heard.

On the contrary, we have made enormous ground. The level of interest shown by the Senate committee during the public hearings is testament to this.

Only a realistic option for a tiny percentage of Australia's 130k online poker players. We are trying to help all poker players, not just the pros.

I would give the end of 2018 around 5%. For 2020, I would expect that we would at least have a bill in progress.

[QUOTE=Lazza61;52758988]Absolutely. The bill effectively passed in March. We got an extra 6 months because of a minor amendment that NXT got through that the government reworded.

Plus the budget sittings delayed it even further as debate on the Gonski bill meant no other business could be heard.


Mm.. It does seem to fit but i still don't believe it was a coincidence just call it a hunch if you will but the way the minister who started this bill tweets it out of nowhere literally the day after a potentially successful hearing..It just seems like they didn't want to wait because of a possible new amendment before it passed, just my opinion.

all the wcoop events after the 11th of september have disappeared from my lobby, all apart from the horse phase event for some reason. atleast they show the tournaments we can enter before the date.

We had a carveout amendment tabled by Leyonhjelm in March which didn't get government (LNP) support. Without support from the Government, we would have virtually no chance of getting anything past the House of Representatives.

However, the LNP did support Leyonhjelm's request for a Senate inquiry, which means they are interested in having a further look.

This is great for us as the Senate Environment and Communications Committee contains our supporters aka Leyonhjelm and Bernardi who drove the majority of the questions during the public hearings.

Hopefully they have similar influence over the other committee members in private.

Our best bet is probably for Leyonhjelm and Bernardi to negotiate their votes for the govt's next budget in May in exchange for the govt adopting the committee's recommendations. Senator Duniam (a Liberal) is also on the committee and seems to be on board and Whish-Wilson (a Green) seems to be as well although it's unlikely the Greens would vote for the budget, although as Whish-Wilson is party leader there's a chance they could vote for legislation implementing the committee's hearings, but if we have the Liberals and the conservative crossbench + Hinch we probably don't need them.

That is not our best bet, they're not giving up their vote on budgets for something so trivial

Ahh so the $215 wcoop at 18:00 AEST should be okay then, maaad