Quote:
Originally Posted by SEABEAST
Quote:
Originally Posted by DoTheMath
Since what threatens is an enforcement action, drawing down online balances is a prudent move.
Can you expand on this? I would have thought that if poker sites were forced to disallow Australians from playing, they would let us cash out our balances.
We are not talking about
starting to force sites to disallow Australians from playeing. Poker sites are already disallowed providing online play to Australians. The prohibition just hasn't been enforced. You can't assume that the commencement of enforcement in Autralia will be preceded by a warning. Black Friday in the US was an enforcement action. After it, AP, FTP and UB didn't let their players cash out. PS customers had no access to their cash for several days.
The Libs say they will investigate how to best enforce the existing ban on online poker. This might mean they give providers a chance to wind up voluntarily, or it might mean they just cut off access to the poker sites' URLs. In either case, players would get theit money back,
as long as the sites actually have the money to give them. Alternatively, it might mean the authorities just start seizing funds without notice, as happend in the US, which reducies the chance that the sites will sitll have the money to give back.
Either way, the increased possibility of enforcement increases the risk that either your money will go away, or you will not have access to it for a while. When funds on deposit are put at increased risk, it is usually prudent to reduce the amount of those funds. The amount you should reduce your funds by depends on your tolerance for the type of risk to which you are exposed and the increase in amount of risk. We can be confident that PokerStars will pay players back as soon as they are allowed to do so. So, if your money is all on Stars, your amount of risk is the income you won't be making somewhere else during the time the money is tied up. If that is small relative to your usual winnings, maybe you don't need to withdraw anything. On any other site there is a chance you won't get your money back at all. If you have properly assessed the risk to date, you have limited the funds you leave on deposit in accordance with your best estimate of the ongoing risk. The Liberals' campaign rhetoric indicates an increase in the risk, so the prudent approach for most should be to reduce the amount of money on deposit.