by the time black friday hit alot had already won wsop entries that wont be the case this time around if nothing is done.

The only way to make them notice is a large scale boycott. But, no one who matters will lead one for fear of being cut off from advertising once the "theoretical" regulation occurs. No one is even considering the fact we could be stuck another 5 years or more with unplayable or nonexistent ipoker.

Are you sure about that?

In April, PS was still promoting an EPT event and hadn't even started their WSOP satellites yet. FT satellites were going for two, maybe three weeks, at most.

Part of the WSOP growth is attributable to the steady, 20 year general increase in it as a game. Online poker is simply part of that general growth, not the reason for it.

OOTH, television (especially once they got the hole card cameras working) has certainly been the biggest contributing factor to the popularity of the game in general, and specifically, the WSOP. It made the game accessible to John Q Everyman. And Moneymaker winning the ME proved anybody can win.

Whoa. It is not like Caesar's is against i-poker. They want it to happen, and to happen now instead of 5 years down the road. Of course they want it on their own terms, and they might not get that in the entire US.

Yes. They are going to step very cautiously. They don't want to threaten their existing business model.

This is just speculation, but I think it makes sense.

I'm not sure I entirely understand this. Wouldn't running a large-scale online poker room be MUCH more profitable than running a B&M hotel/casino?

Without having to worry about the huge payment processing expenses that Stars/Tilt had to deal with, I would think there would be little to no overhead once they got things up and running. Upper management located in Vegas or wherever and a bunch of tech-support and customer service people in India. They can spend whatever makes sense on advertising, and beyond that they'd just be printing money. 300k-1m players online just pumping out rake 24/7/365. A much better business than traditional casinos, IMO. And it becomes even better than that if they take the long view and see legalized online poker as a stepping stone to full-on legalized online gambling. Millions of people playing quarter slots or blackjack for $1/hand from their phones/ipad instead of angry birds.

Awesome, let's create more jobs for India. Strong selling point for legislation.

And I don't think an 8% gaming tax on revenues is something to just dismiss. That is at least 20% of the revenues, maybe more.

good post besides the outsourcing jobs part....

No.

especially customer support.

The total Take-Out for the 2011 WSOP was: $15,702,082.

Quite the contrary, Caesars believes that, bottom line, their existing business model is facing badly diminshing returns, unless they establish a presence online; This online presence has two facets, offering a sticky experience to market gambling for their existing business, as well as offering online gambling itself..

( I have heard this analysis from Caesars spokepeople directly at least twice. I happen to think the latter, offering gambling itself IS the real future, but Caesars still has $Billions of capital assets stuck in the B&M industry that they need to get some return on. For years, the online industry leveraged Caesars' hotel assets, promoting the WSOP for example as a reason to play on some remote server at the Kahnawake Mohawk Territories. Caesars now has a database of all active WSOP players going back several years. Caesars perceives that, if it can get online, it has the opportunity to replace the past online "partners" who built the WSOP up and move direclty into their former US market space online .....)

This drive to get online goes beyond poker however. Faced with an aging demographic for their existing B&M business, and understanding that marketing has moved to reliance upon an online presence, Caesars ultimately perceives its need for an online presence and experience to stay competitive long term for the entertainment dollar.

Caesars' feared long term competition is online social media companies, fighting for the discretionary income and entertainment market of a younger demographic. Competition within the US casino industry is NOT the bottom line long term fear; th3e fear long term is a loss of future demand for what the casino industry sells as a whole category within entertainment, period.

The Gambling Industry will lose its grip on future US discretionary income flows unless it gets online in the US.

You might have inadvertently stumbled on something here. What if the operators kept the jobs necessary to run the sites here in the USA? By that, I mean ALL of them. Globalism is great and blah blah blah BUT, wouldn't that be a great selling point for the cause? I'm SURE it's been suggested here before, but reiteration never hurts.

This post makes a lot of sense. Too bad Caesars and the like didn't have this vision 5 years ago when UIGEA came into play.

If I am not mistaken, there was talk of allowing the B&M casinos to offer i-poker while many of the pre-UIGEA attempts to address i-gambling were being formulated/discussed in Congress. It just was gonna get permitted then, so Caesar's simply cried for relief from the loss of business to offshore companies. Now that it is at least a viable possibility, they are singing a different song.

Most weight/One to get an online Poker bill passed ASAP

[] Barton
[x] Reid
[]2+2

Bartons raising focus, playing Political Chess/Pawn, Reid and the other Pro-ponents are aware of this, so while the credibility is raised via all these other subcommittees etc... It will be Harry Reid and a Senate Bill that will soon answer all your wishes. How do I know, I don't. I'm just on LifeT1lt, so take it for a grain of salt, just sayin'

They didn't have a prayer of moving pro-poker legislation five years ago. A prohibition bill (HR 4411, the bill that became UIGEA after getting watered down in the Senate) passed the House that year 317-93. Three years prior, a ban bill passed the Senate 90-10. In that environment, it made perfect business sense to support legislation banning competition in an area in which they themselves were banned from competing.

Much of the movement we see now is due to poker players helping to make passing further anti-poker measures at the federal level virtually impossible while at the same time improving the possibility of passing pro-poker legislation. We didn't have to shift the environment 180 degrees. We just had to shift things a few degrees here and a few degrees there to get other interests on board with the idea of licensed online poker.

agree 100% Rich......

I am curious what you think our timelines are. What do you think our chances are in this congress? or the next? Don't cop out and tell me you aren't a betting man

I'd love to hear TE's answer to this too, but I don't think it is fair to expect him to answer this in a public forum. If he gives an optimistic timeline and nothing happens, he and the PPA look bad. If he gives a pessimistic timeline, people will say "why bother" and won't stay in the fight. There may be some middle ground responses that would work better, but even those would cause a ****storm here and don't really do him or the cause any good.

I don't want to discourage TE from answering this if he wants to, but my guess is that he won't want to and now has to give some excuse even though you specifically asked him not to.

I know it's exciting to consider prospects for passage.

And as much as I value TE's opinion I doubt anyone really knows what will happen at this point. Even if Harry Reid wants to get it done this year, or the next, so much has to happen.

There will be signs along the way, but we won't really know till it happens.

Has this bill passed yet? What's the hold up?

It hasn't even been submitted.

One thing to keep in mind, the Caesar's of today is not the same company as then.

Following passage of UIGEA the company stock went up somewhere arounf 12-15 dollars per share, they then sold out to a private equity firm.

UIGEA was VERY profitable to the stock holder back then.

This while after UIGEA passage the Onkline public companies took a beating value wise.

Also, (research needed as to which one now, IDNRC) Caesars and some other Vegas B&M's purchased some plateforms that were shut down following UIGEA for literally mere dollars and IIRC one or two for single dollar.

obg

I would look to the fall close to election time so the GOP can try to parlay support from the I-Poker community by giving us back what they have been fighting to keep from us.

obg

+ 10,000 hotel rooms occupied for 6 weeks
+ millions in restaurant revenue
+ millions in pit games revenue
+ millions in shops revenue
etc

The overall dollar figure the WSOP is worth is massive, compared to the rake taken from the donkaments.