Well, I might think that I have it bad but yesterday was a pretty sad day indeed for US players. I don't know the full details but the FBI seem to have managed to prevent Poker Stars, Full Tilt and Absolute poker from providing an online poker service to US players! The excuse being that the sites flouted the law by continuing to place money in banks illegally which was - shock horror - gained from gambling.
To this day, I still find this whole anti-gambling thing to be bizarre. To my mind, every single country in the world has citizens who like the odd gamble. Loads of people throughout the world like to gamble - yet, as is so often the case, a small minority of powerful people in various governments seem to have this overwhelming desire to prevent operators from giving people that bit of fun!
Over the last twenty years or so, technology has taken off and the internet has exploded into an amazing source of communication and entertainment. Among the million and one amazing things you can do - you can actually play poker sitting up in bed against people from all over the world!! THAT is amazing. To disallow the luxury of giving people the freedom to do this is just madness in the extreme. No one should be able to disallow a person's right to do that!
While grappling with the reasons why governments do this, the only thing I can think of is that there is a huge amount of money being generated by the operator's cut - and that the government must be missing out in some way on the revenue. The excuse that they are preventing problem gambling is just laughable - as if we ALL need to be protected from squandering our money. There is only a fraction of a percent of compulsive gamblers out there who are really out of control - and if they can't get their fix online they'll just go somewhere else anyway. Also, by the same token why not ban alcohol to protect alcoholics? Ban the selling of cigarettes to protect heavy smokers from getting lung cancer? Or why not go the whole hog and ban cars to prevent people dying in road accidents!?
No, for me, I think the religious element of the government in the USA is strangling the down-to-earth right to have a gamble. Making money from gambling does not sit well with these people and so if the government can't do it - then no one can. (Or at least until how they can figure out how to get a piece of the pie themselves without being perceived to be the all new all-powerful rake of the poker industry.)
This whole thing stinks.
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