US banning online gaming

Today George Bush is expected to sign a new law making it illegal for online gaming firms to accept payments from players in the US. This will therefore make it difficult for US poker players to play online as the companies will not be able to accept payments from them.

Why are they doing this? Well, the senator who introduced this bill, Bill Frist, has claimed it has been introduced to protect it's citizen from debt, addiction, and criminal activity. Yet, they're not banning live casinos, and if anything, this is going to make people play in more shadier cardrooms where there are no rules or controls. The other thing that makes this all suspicious is that the new bill has been tagged onto the US 'Port Security' bill which is the main bill protecting it's sea & airports from terrorism. What on earth does poker have to do with port security? The reason this was done was to avoid any possible objections or defeat. Which senator is going to vote against Port Security?

On all the poker forums I look at, the Americans are up in arms about this, and quite rightly too. But how does this affect me in the UK? Well, I can see 2 obvious things:

1) The standard of opponents will probably increase. This sounds like I'm stereotyping Americans as bad players. I suppose I am, but it's common knowledge that the easier games are during US peak times. There are a lot of very good Amercian players, but at the same time, there are a lot of very bad ones too.

2) The traffic will drop. When I want to play, I don't want to have to wait for half an hour for a table to fill up (this applies to SNG games). I want to play one straight away. Similarly with ring games. I hate it when there are hardly any $1/2 table free and I have to wait for someone to leave.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Two of the major poker sites, Poker Stars & Full Tilt Poker have stated publicly that they will continue to accept US customers. This is good for me as these are the 2 sites I play the most at. Surprisingly Party Poker, the world's biggest poker site, has stated the opposite and will not be accepting US players. I say surprising because Party is one of the few sites that could have had some real clout when it came to opposing the ban and influencing others. Instead they did nothing and simply rolled over. Whilst they do have players from other parts of the world, I can't really see them being the force they once were. All their US customers are now defecting to the remaining sites opposing the ban. I've already withdrawn what little funds I had there.

What this has also done is see these sites compete for new players by offering all sorts of incentives. For example, Full Tilt & Absolute are now offering Rakeback on EXISTING customers. In the past, this only used to be offered to brand new customers. I've already applied for the Full Tilt offer which will pay me back 27% of all rake I pay. Due to the relatively low limits I play at, this won't amount to much, but it's better than nothing :-).

The next couple of months will be interesting times in the poker industry. I can see a lot of sites closing down. In my opinion, I don't think this is a bad thing. I personally think there's too many out there nowadays.