There was great news in the poker community today when it was announced that the DOJ and PokerStars (and by extension Full Tilt Poker) ended their legal dispute that started April 15, 2011 — what has become known as “Black Friday” — when the DOJ effectively shutdown the three biggest online poker websites and scared the bejesus out of many others. You can read about the agreement here: http://www.pokerstars.com/press/pdf/ps-settles-us-dispute-acquires-assets-of-ftp.pdf
The short version is that in acquiring Full Tilt, PokerStars is agreeing to pay out any money in the frozen accounts of Full Tilt’s players, which they did not have access to since Black Friday largely because Full Tilt had shady accounting practices made worse by the sudden DOJ action forcing them to pay all accounts immediately.
I’m really happy about the decision, but it seems to me that if online poker had simply always been legal and regulated (reasonably), it wouldn’t have possibly destroyed at least one major poker business and seriously interrupted two others, not to mention the thousands of players, many of them professional poker players who’s sole livelihood was by playing poker, and the US would have been collecting taxes from all parties all along. Instead, one business is being asked to take on the debts of another, in the hopes that it can enter the US market once the law makers get around to making it unambiguous to play online poker and run a poker business over the internet.
I’ve said it before, but it is still unfathomable to me that the country that essentially invented poker, and certainly escalated it to what it is today, a country where poker is intertwined with our mythology and mystique, a country founded on principals of freedom and individual liberty, is not leading the world in both online poker players (we were) and online poker businesses.
Appalling… lets hope this latest decision gets us on the path to fixing that error quickly.
