Party Poker runs scared

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, over the weekend Party Poker has stopped taking wagers from players in the US. This is the knee-jerk reaction to the new law signed late last week by our fearless leader.

For a country who’s government loves to place a tax on anything and everything even more than it loves to breath, I find it absolutely amazing that they would rather put a ban on Internet gambling, which is a blanket that shouldn’t really cover poker, a game of skill, in the first place, rather than coming up with a way to place a tax on it where they could syphon off a few hundred million dollars each and every year.

Sites like Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars are going to reap the rewards when the multiple millions of US based online poker players look to play. These sites have already stated that they have no plans to close their doors to the US market. They have no reason to.

What absolutely slays me about this whole situation is the way this new law was brought forward. It was slid in as part of a port security bill. At the press conference, Bush makes statements like:

“We’re going to protect our ports. We’re going to defend this homeland, and we’re going to win this war on terror”

But makes no mention of the internet gaming portion of the bill. How convenient.

It will be interesting to see where this goes over the next few months. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this.

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