Poker Magazine

The Obvious, The Unchanged, and The Things Nobody Talks About

It’s been about one year since Black Friday – September 29^th 2006 – the day Bill Frist snuck his little Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA) into a completely unrelated Port Securities bill.

Ah, we fondly remember it like it was a year ago. We had just posted some pics of babe Adriana Lima on our site (with the headline “Adriana Lima Because Nothing Interesting Is Happening Today”), when a reader sent us an email telling us to “Turn on C-SPAN, you idiots.”

To our horror, we saw that, despite a week’s worth of trying and failing, Bill Frist figured out a way to get the UIGEA slipped into an unbeatable bill. As Gorilla Monsoon would say, it was the biggest “Pearl Harbor job” ever done to the poker world.

We then called Michael Bolcerek from the Poker Player’s Alliance (PPA) to get his take. His take: “Yep, it’s going to pass, we’re screwed.”

In the next week, we spent more time on the 2+2 and Neverwin Poker forums than probably the last four years combined, reading everyone’s “expert” analysis on the situation. Good stuff and great to see how passionate poker players were on the subject. If nly they had been this passionate in previous years, making sure the bill had never gotten that far.

With that in mind, here’s our breakdown of what’s changed in poker in the past year, after the UIGEA.

THE OBVIOUS

US facing customers don’t have many options anymore.

You can count on one hand the sites that accept US customers today. The hundreds of other options have gone away. However, if you can get money into those accounts, there are more players than ever to go against. Rooms fill up quicker than Kirstie Alley at a buffet. Not sure if that analogy makes any sense, but let’s go with it. We’re on a deadline here.

The money is moving overseas.

The WSOP Europe is a harbinger of things to come, and in a big way. Until the US gets its act together and carves out poker from the UIGEA, we’ll all be following the money to Europe. Or China. With the WPT’s recently announced partnership with the oppressive communist nation, it seems like the Asian market is finally ready to explode. Awesome. Just what we need – more good Asian players.

THE UNCHANGED

People still love poker.

Everyone was looking at the WSOP this year to see the real impact of the UIGEA. Now that US facing sites couldn’t pay for someone’s entry into the WSOP, how would it affect the overall number of entrants? The answer: not much. Most of the prelim events were still on par with or greater than previous years, and the Main Event had more entries than it did in 2005, the year “Salty” Joe Hachem won. So poker’s popularity didn’t wane. The biggest difference in this year’s WSOP and last year’s WSOP was the absence of the online gaming lounges and, unfortunately, the Bodog exhibit in the Gaming Life Expo that featured hot girls pillow fighting. Wethinks if Bill Frist was aware that his little bill would end up keeping hot girls from pillow fighting each other, he might not have been so balls-to-the-wall in getting it passed. Frist may be evil, but he does have a penis.

Adriana Lima is still hot.

Clearly Lima’s hotness distracted us on September 29th, 2006. We feel no remorse about this. Over the past year, Lima has not gotten any less attractive. In fact, she’s probably even more attractive. Go figure.

THE THINGS NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

Online sites still not lobbying hard enough.

Part of the reason the UIGEA passed was because the major online sites (Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, Party Poker, etc.) were 100% asleep at the wheel. While the PPA was running around and aptly warning everyone that the sky was falling, the poker sites just kept counting their money, hoping that everything would be okay. The lack of a concerted lobbying effort from what should’ve been a conglomerate of poker sites was totally inexcusable. Why do you think horse racing, clearly a form of gambling, was carved out? Because they have one powerful, well-funded lobby. While the PPA has stepped up its efforts in a big way, what are the online sites really doing, financially, to truly help them out? Not enough.

Jeffrey Pollack wants to do away with the hot girls at the Gaming Life Expo.

All right, this one is somewhat off topic, but it’s not getting enough play in the “mainstream” poker media. In an interview with Friend of WCP Michele Lewis, Pollack mentioned how he didn’t want all the strip clubs (and subsequently, strippers) at next year’s Gaming Life Expo. To this, we ask, “Why even bother having one???” Seriously, we love knowing we can buy poker chips with T.J. Cloutier’s face on them or that we can buy t-shirts that say, “I have the nuts”; except in reality we actually don’t care at all about that stuff. Give us dunk-a-stripper again or dammit, bring back the pillow-fighting Bodog girls! Damn you, UIGEA!!!