Bush Signs the Bill

On Friday the 13th (DUN DUN DUH! AHHHHHHHH!) President Bush signed the Safe Port Act into law and after 8 years of steady growth, online poker took it's first ever step back. So far there have been two fairly major developments that have affected me personally as well as a few secondary concerns.

The first major development is the declaration by firepay that they will no longer make transfers to and from gambling sites. Firepay is a third party company based outside the US that used to serve as an intermediary between your bank and gambling websites. While in most cases you could transfer money to and from your bank directly, this process took a few days if not a week. On the other hand, with firepay once they'd verified your identity and bank account info, you could make deposits that would get credited instantly (they made their money by charging $4 for every deposit). This was handy for me if I wanted to play at a new website for the first time or found a tournament that I wanted to play at a website where I had account with no money in it. Just a few clicks and in 90 seconds or so I could start playing on a new site.

I'm sorry to see them go, but there is another option - neteller. Neteller does exactly the same thing, but seems a little bit worse. For one thing, instead of charging you $4 on an instant deposit they charge you 8%! They do allow free deposits and withdrawals, but it seems like they take about a week in either direction. I imagine they keep this process as slow as they can to encourage the instant deposits. 8% is a prohibitive amount for me so I'll no longer be able to do instant deposits. Instead I'll probably be forced to keep some sizeable chunk of money in there at all times. This really isn't that big of a deal, but it is a minor inconvenience.

The second development, which is much more significant, is the total demise of party poker. As soon as Bush signed the bill party poker voluntarily blocked all US users from playing in their games. This is big news since party poker was the biggest poker website out there. They were just a shade behind pokerstars in terms of multi table tournaments but they had at least twice as many cash games running at any given time as their closest competitor. Furthermore once you got above the low limits (maybe above $5/$10) they had as many games running as ALL of the other websites in existence put together.

When I first started playing online poker, party poker was the place I started. Every time they deal a hand it gets a number. The first hand they ever dealt in 1999 was hand #1. By the time I started in January 2004 they'd made it to hand number 240,000,000 after 5 years of operation. In the two and a half years since they've dealt over FIVE BILLION more hands. The reason I chose them to start with was they advertised up to 25,000+ simultaneous users. This kind of thing would happen about 8 p.m. pacific on a Friday or Saturday night. Coming from a card room with 25 tables that would have 250 players playing at once, this was totally insane. A few years later, before the shutdown you could find 25,000 players playing at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday and at peak hours you'd find 100,000.

The good thing is about 10 months ago I pretty much jumped ship from party poker. While I spent the first year and a half or so of my online career playing 95% on party poker, on January 1st of this year pokerstars introduced a rewards system that is worth $1,000-$2,000 a month to me for doing the same stuff. It makes sense for them because they're making 3 or 4 times that amount from me and they wouldn't have gotten anything at all without it. Actually, even if they totally cancelled the rewards system I'd still stick with pokerstars because I like their software and service much better than any other site I've played on.

The good news is I didn't lose any money and Jen and I actually MADE a few dollars off the deal. How the hell did we manage that? We're f-ing geniuses that's how! In all seriousness it came from the party poker Monster series of tournaments. They had close to $15,000,000 accumulated for the final tournament and were forced to totally dissolve the entire system of weekly and monthly tournaments. As a result for every weekly entry a player had, he or she was credited with $125 dollars. Every monthly entry was now worth $350 and every final entry was worth $1,500. Sadly we didn't have any final entries, but I did have two monthly entries and Jen had three! This means party poker dumped $1,750 into the Huff coffers as a little going away present.

A few of the other publicly traded and maybe one or two privately owned websites have stopped serving US customers. From what I understand US customers make up 80% of the market so I would assume that some of the smallest websites may be forced to close up shop without US dollars coming in. On the other hand the websites that do stay in operation should get a nice boost.

I already posted the e-mail that I got from Full Tilt Poker and here is the core of the message I got from another website:

"I want to confirm to all existing and potential poker players that itÂ’s business as usual here at DoyleÂ’s Room and we continue to accept players from all over the world including the United States of America. We at DoyleÂ’s Room have taken extensive legal advice and believe that it is far too early to fully understand the implications of this bill on our industry. Based on the legal advice we have received, the new bill does not make internet poker expressly illegal nor does it take aim at players who enjoy online poker. However, there are some U.S. States that have existing regulations in place that may prohibit online gaming, so we encourage all of our U.S. players to review the laws of the State in which they reside. Until such time as the law becomes clearer, DoyleÂ’s Room will operate as normal with our full exciting range of games and tournaments at all limits."


Pokerstars has yet to make any kind of formal declaration, but I hear that if you send them an e-mail asking what's going on they'll send you a pretty similar response.

Another interesting result of the bill is a few of websitesstes are offering major bonuses for depositing money into your account. I kept a fair amount of money in pokerstars, but took everything out of all of the otwebsitesstes. I'm sure most players took almost all of their money out and the websites have to do something to encourage people to put that money back in. What they do is offer you a deposit bonus that is only released after you play some insane number of hands. The more you deposit, the bigger bonus you get, but you have to play more hands to get it. For example, Jen just deposited $550 into Doyle's Room. After she earns 165,000 "action points" they are going to match her deposit and give her another $550 which she can leave in her account or take out or whatever. Sounds great right? The rub is that it takes a long time to earn all those action points. I think she gets 750 for every $55 single table tournament and the number of action points she gets for playing cash games depends on how much money she puts into the pot (this is kind of a wacky way of doing it - mwebsitesstes look at how many hands you play or how much money they take in rakecalculatealte how many points you earn). It would be easy for someone like me to earn the points in a timely manner on pokerstars, but the problem is these smaller sites don't run very many SNG's. They just don't have the customer base. So instead of a $55 SNG going off every 2 minutes, they start every 30 minutes or so. I may just bite the bullet and play some cash games. I have to do the math and estimate how long it will take me to earn the points and if my time might be better spent just winning money doing what I do best.

The government has given themselves 270 days to come up with ways to enforce the provisions of the new bill. I figure things will stay the way they are today until at least next summer. At that time there is a chance that nothing will happen and there is a chance that the government will really go after the websites. I don't think any poker players are going to be arrested and I suspect that the movement to fully legalize online poker will grow by leaps and bounds in the coming months. If it does get fully legalized I'll be lighting up cigars with $100 bills on the balcony of my Tuscan Villa, but I only give that about a 10% chance of happening in the next 5 years.

I'll keep you posted on what I hear and what happens.