Shuffle up and deal!

Those are words that I’ve never heard once in all the poker tournaments that I’ve played, and believe me, I’ve played a ton of them. Just not any since “Black Friday.” On April 15, 2011, all real money players in the United States had their online accounts frozen, and all real money play was suspended. Along with the millions of dollars frozen in accounts, my $75 is still sitting there in cyberspace. More than anything, it took away entertainment from many casual players like me who just enjoyed playing a tournament every once in awhile. It took away the ease of playing a game of poker without having to get 9 friends together, or without having to drive down to a casino and spend hours upon hours and hundreds of dollars.

This once thriving industry was shut down for a few reasons, gered, idiocy, and fear of gambling.

Greed is pretty easy to see, despite the fact that Full Tilt was raking (forgive the pun) in millions of dollars every year from US players, they have been accused of taking over $400 million from player accounts in what has been called a gigantic ponzi scheme. Apparently having millions of dollars in income every year wasn’t enough, they had to kill the golden goose to get more. Full Tilt was also accused of creating “bots” in order to win money from other players. These bots would be nothing more than computer programs from the site, programs that would know what the player had in their hand, and would act accordingly. These rumors were never found true, but they also did not help the case for online poker in America.
Those problems never would have arisen if people didn’t have such a fear of gambling. For some reason in this country, it’s assumed that if you gamble with any sort of regularity, or at all, you have a problem and cannot control yourself. Do we say this about smokers? Or alcoholics? We do! Yet those things are legal, and gambling is not.
How would these problems not have come about? Regulation!! Any industry that charged a “sin” tax, like strip clubs, indian casinos, cigarette companies, and even brothels in Nevada (where in some counties prostitution is legal), are generally run in a clean and completely legal way. For some reason, people ignore this fact and think that only criminals engage in these activities.
Look at what has happened since online poker was shut down in the US…Can you find anything? Do we have an entire generation of online poker players automatically running to their nearest casino to get their “fix?” No! In fact, all the college age kids who enjoyed playing online poker have just gone and found other things to do. In fact, for people like me, it’s actually hurt my bank account, seeing as I was winning consistently.
Think of how online poker could be run if it were legalized in the US. The companies would have to adhere to guidelines of how much cash must be on hand at all times. They would have to run their site like casinos where they would have to have a dollar for each “chip” in play. This would be subject to audit, and would have prevented any sort of ponzi scheme like what happened recently.
Fortunately, some states have already come to their senses. Nevada, of course, has already legalized online gambling, The District of Columbia, New Jersey and California have all tried to pass legislation to legalize it. I just hope it happens soon. It’s been estimated that online gaming could generate over $2 billion a year in revenues across the country. Of course that doesn’t even put a dent into the budget shortfalls that we’ve had lately, but it’s a start.
Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to jump on a computer when I have a bit of free time to play a $5 buy in tournament and win a little bit of money. Right now it looks like Full Tilt has been bought by PokerStars.com for $731 million, and I can’t imagine that they would have made that purchase if US online gaming would not be coming back. When it does, I’ll enjoy my $75 greatly.