Merge and a few other smaller sites are allowing US players, but Poker Stars and ipoker for example still don't. What are the smaller sites doing that allows them to circumvent whichever law prohibits the rest of them from being able to allow those players?

Really a complicated answer if you want it to be complete.

Short answer: The sites that are accepting US players have found a way for US players to deposit without violating the UIGEA or committing bank fraud(or they haven't been caught).

The ones who don't are either a) publicly traded companies that withdrew voluntarily from the US market when the UIGEA was passed in 2006(Party, Paradise) or b) privately traded companies that got indicted for bank fraud for how they were routing money to their sites from US players (PokerStars, FullTilt, Absolute).

Again, the complete answer is way more complicated than that.

"allowed" is the operative word here

theres sites that only allow us players (illegally)

Misleading title and usage of the word "allowed". There are only a few sites that are legally allowed to host players from the US and those are either sweepstakes stuff / subscription or got a Nevada license. All others that let players from the US continue to gamble simply do it because they can / want to.
Not really.

so there are some sites that are legal with USA government?

i got the idea (mentioned by others) that it just came down to how much personal risk operators/owners are willing to take?

thug life

nevada has one site now (http://www.ultimatepoker.com/), more to come.

new jersey should have several legal licensed sites running this winter.

deleware is setting up a way to offer poker and other casino games online through their state lottery idk about timetables there.

all of these would only affect the people within the borders of the states that have passed legislation to specifically regulate online poker games online. example: i can't play nevada's legal online poker site from michigan, but if i visit nevada i can play from a mcdonalds or a hotel even though i don't live there.

an easy way to advocate for proliferation of such legislation in your state and federally is to participate in the PPA's Daily Action plan

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...06&postcount=1

I just read an article on foxnews that a new govt agency is going to start monitoring 80% of all credit card transactions. I wonder if this will affect usa players who use them to deposit, or the sites willingness to accept them.

there's a reason merge updates every 3 days, i think its some sort of encryption to evade a possible doj seizure.

they don't allow them to operate its just there to small to even bother wasting taking down. Biggest site right now for US players is bovada and they top out around 3000 or less. The other sites like Merge and WPN are 1/3 the size of Bovada if not smaller. So really your talking about sites that are small it be a waste of time to go afterwards.

Im pretty sure merge gets up to 7k at peak hours.. 10k on Sunday's. Otherwise i agree with your post

we don't talk about fight club

Yeah merge is usually 4000-8000 every weekday with 10k on sat and sun. Not sure where you got your "1/3 the size"

It really is sleazy how they snuck the legislation into a completely unrelated bill the way they did.

Will Poker Stars be able to run in those states and allow US players again? And why doesn't Bovada allow non US players? I don't see why they'd refuse the chance to take in money from other countries.

FYI its 6:16pm MST right now and there's 6922 ppl on Merge

I'd suggest having a look at existing threads here, in Internet Poker, and Poker Legislation, as you're covering a lot of ground that's been covered hundreds of times before.

But just to give you a quick answer on Bovada, they don't allow non-US players because that's their US-facing skin. I believe they also have Bodog888 focused on the Asian market, and Bodog.eu for the European market, but I'm pretty sure they stopped offering poker in Europe a number of months ago.

I look around... I see alot of new faces... Which means that you most of you have been breaking the first rule of fight club..

Always amazes me how so many people think that there is only one "legal" poker site in the US right now a/k/a Ultimate Poker.

In reality, Ultimate Poker is the only government-regulated site actually live at this point, but that is not the same thing as the only legal site.

The fact of the matter is that if it is "legal" under U.S. law for any Nevada-licensed and approved company to offer online poker, then it is just as "legal" for any other site to offer online poker anywhere else.

Those other sites, therefore, are not allowing play "illegally" at this time, pursuant to a re-interpretation of the anti-online gambling laws that did in Full Tilt, Stars, etc. on Black Friday.

Basically, the government re-interpreted the same law it used to shut down FT, Stars, etc., and under that new interpretation of the law, turns out playing poker itself is alright after all.

Otherwise, no site would be able to operate anywhere, not even Nevada, not New Jersey, not Delaware, etc.

The real question being asked, it seems, is why ain't FT and Stars getting their feet back into the water since it's all legal now, and the answer to that specific question probably has a lot to do with settlements made in the prosecution against FT, Stars, etc., back when the law that is now considered legal was considered illegal.

Lawyers.

What did Shakespeare say?

No, that's incorrect. Nevada has made online poker, subject to their regulation, explicitly legal. This is different than a site offering online poker in another state that hasn't passed any such legislation, or offering online poker in NV without going through the regulatory hurdles.

IANAL, but I don't believe there's been any reinterpretation. The U in UIGEA is the important point here - it's aimed at unlawful Internet gambling. Once a state has made poker explicitly legal, any site that has been approved to offer it no longer needs to fear its transactions being subject to the UIGEA.

Many will argue that online poker isn't illegal in most states (Washington being one obvious exception, where they have a specific law against it), but the problem is that the DOJ disagrees, and feel they can seize funds under the UIGEA - that makes it a risky environment for online poker sites.

The other answer is that nothing has changed for FT and Stars. It's no more legal or illegal for them to offer online poker now than it has been for the last 7 years, and they'd be sitting on the sidelines just as much now if they hadn't agreed to any settlements.

Edit to add: In before people who know much more than I about US law shred my post. I think I have at least my general ideas correct, if not all the legal nuances, but I'm certainly no expert on US law. Or any law.

Wrong..merge updates every 3 days because their 1 man dev team is incompetent. He'll role out one new feature a month without any real testing and spend the next month patching it. You can tell by the graphics that whoever is designing went to school for it 20 years ago.

Also can we shut down this thread please. Bringing attention to this is not in our best interest.

Liveace.com though....

If part of the reason for it is what you say it is, then I would truly love to get some probable technical details about it. Could be very interesting.
The other option of the software needing too much patching makes sense if compared to UX.

Dude, you are going around bashing all the US player sites in some form or another except bovada. Ok we get it.

You miss the whole point, which is federal supremacy. Nevada cannot override US law.

Thus, it must no longer be considered illegal nationwide to play poker online in order for Nevada, et. al., to now be able to offer "legal" or regulated poker.


Subsequent to Black Friday, the UIGEA did not change, but the DOJ's interpretation of the Wire Act DID change, which is what created the opportunity to allow individual states to offer online poker. On December 23, 2011, DOJ issued an opinion that changed its interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961 (18 U.S.C. §1084), declaring that the Act's prohibitions applied to gambling at issue related to a sporting event or contest. As a result of the new DOJ interpretation, the primary barrier to Internet gambling within the United States was lifted, as almost all other federal prohibitions related to Internet gambling require and underlying violation of a state law or a different federal law.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/busines...internet-poker

If Governor Sandavol thought for a moment that online poker was still illegal in the US, he never would have approved Nevada legislation allowing online poker. Something changed, and that something was a re-interpretation of the law by DOJ as it relates to funds being used in the banking system for playing online poker.

On the other hand, individual states certainly can opt out, which is effectively what the boneheads in Washington state have done (due to the influence of the Indian casinos in that state).


What? EVERYTHING changed for FT and Stars on Black Friday. EVERYTHING.

If it weren't for Black Friday, Stars would still be rocking along in the USA and be hands down the dominant US online poker provider. Not sure what would have happened to Tilt but it probably would have blown up on its own accord.

What DID happen, however, is that Stars bought Tilt, and more importantly entered into a binding agreement with DOJ which effectively prohibits it from providing online poker to US residents.

But wait - that's not right either. Because clearly US residents ARE playing on Stars, all over the world - they just have bogus secondary residences in places like Canada, Mexico, etc.

I think that is what this thread was all about in the first place and I totally agree that someone who is a legal resident of the state of New York should NOT be allowed to play on Stars regardless of their physical location at the time.