The Legalization Of Sports Betting Could Be Big For Online Poker
What a day for America. It might sound a bit exaggerated, but I really do think this is a big step as a country. You can’t walk down the street in London without seeing an ad or a shop for sports betting. It’s not celebrated, it’s just legal. It’s a lot like how DraftKings is here, it’s just accepted as a part of the world. It never really made sense that you couldn’t walk into a Ladbrokes and place a bet on your way home from work in the USA. It’s sort of like how we blur out middle fingers on television. Just weird things like that in this here country that would never happen in other countries.
But now, the tides they are a turnin. The Supreme Court has lifted the federal ban on sports betting. States are like this looking at the revenue potential:
Actually, more like this:
When I saw this news, the first thing I thought was “now do it for online poker”. There are a lot of weird rules and laws, but basically the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) needs to be lifted. It’s a bullshit law that
“prohibits gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet and that is unlawful under any federal or state law.” The act specifically excludes fantasy sports that meet certain requirements, skill-games and legal intrastate and intertribal gaming.
And that’s why we can’t play poker. Even in New Jersey where I’ve lived the last year and a half until last week, it was still really hard to get money onto online poker sites because the banks are weary of the legality of it all. The same way the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, they need to do the same for UIGEA.
Hopefully the online books and online casinos/poker rooms go hand in hand.
Card Player - The defeat of PASPA will likely be a big win for online poker. How? Because sports betting, at least in New Jersey and other tech savvy states, will be conducted both in the brick-and-mortar setting as well as over the internet. PASPA’s demise means a boon for online casinos.
“If we win sports wagering, online gaming will go to every state that adopts sports betting,” David Rebuck, director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, told the Associated Presslast year. “As soon as sports wagering is legalized, online gambling will follow right behind it.”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when a state like California legalizes sports betting. Will online poker follow? Or are the two not as connected as we want to think? Hopefully the former, but wouldn’t shock me if it’s the latter. We really need federal legalization for the banks to accept money from these companies via changes to the Wire Act and UIEGA, but this could also be a way around it too. Right now it’s all cloudy but there is definitely sunshine peaking through.