Las Vegas Sun Newsgaming:
Online poker: What you need to know about the complex industry
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19 November 2012
1:55 a.m.
As Nevada moves toward launching real-money online poker, there are several concepts to keep in mind about the complexities of the emerging industry. Consider: • It is unclear whether Congress will approve Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada-friendly plan to limit American online gambling to player-to-player poker, horse racing and lottery tickets or whether legislators will favor a more comprehensive federal plan. By limiting the scope of play online, Reid hopes to protect Nevada’s casinos from Internet competition while also boosting the state as a leader in the development and regulation of the national online poker industry. Keep in mind: player-to-player poker ...
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Speaking from 15 years of experience in the online ID/age verification industry, it is my opinion that any claim of being able to prevent under-age participation in online gaming should be taken with a grain of salt, if not an outright call of BS!
The same goes for any claim to be able to spot collusion. Brick and mortar gaming has a hard enough time of doing that, online gaming can't hope to stop it when it is trivial to engage in such in that environment.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that adults should be allowed to engage in many activities that some might call immoral, but I have real doubts about the claims made in this story.
Poker players believe that poker is a life skill such as numeracy, probability, resource management, risk assessment, and ways to positively channel aggression. They believe that poker can be used as a superior means of teaching critical life skills such as negotiating, resource management and risk assessment.
I am not a poker player but after reading articles about online poker I decided to research the subject. I logged on to my old friend Wikipedia the free encyclopedia and looked up the words skill and bluff.
For the past week, I read articles about online poker. Then I slept on it to allow my subconscious mind to sort the information.
This is my conclusion. Internet Poker is bluff on the American gambler. Without the bluff the game evaporates.
There are millions of poker players who will disagree with my theory - you be the judge and decide what is right for your family when online poker is legalized and money begins to change hands.
But, keep this in mind, don't allow your children to be pulled into the Internet gambling web.
Illegal Internet gambling was a $30 billion a year business. The money used to be the gamblers now it belongs to the promoters.
Boftx,
Your point of monitoring and identifying, will be the main items that will stop online poker from being approved at the Federal level.
Lawmakers in Washington will not approve online poker at the Federal level. The votes are not there, the support is not there! The larger casinos know this. This is not something that will not happen in our life time, if ever! Casinos companies are preparing for State approved online poker.
Ponder this if you will, "if" the Federal Government were to approve online poker, this would open the door for Federal Oversight of Gaming throughout the United States. Again, "if" the Federal Government were to approved online poker this would open the door for the Federal Government to have power over gaming in any state with legalized casino gaming.
Approval at the Federal level for any type of online waging, either between two parties, or against gaming company will open a Pandora's Box the gaming industry will regret. The Federal Government never gives something without receiving something.
Just as underage players have always been able to play in brick and mortar casinos when they obtained phony IDs, there's no way to prevent them from playing on-line, especially if they're enabled by a cooperative adult (of the type where they would buy their phony IDs, or a family member who sees no harm in their playing). However, I suspect the underage player problem is not that significant with reasonable controls, but the issue is really a straw dog for those who oppose the concept of on-line play for ANYONE due to their personal moral or religious beliefs which they seek to impose on others.
Collusion is not so much an issue in on-line tournaments, where the player doesn't control what table he sits at.
I don't believe on-line poker will, perhaps ever, become what it was just a few years ago, where you could risk $200 in a Sunday tournament competing with 5,000+ worldwide players for a million dollar prize pool. There are too many greedy interests each pursuing their own selfish goals and ineffectually contesting the issue with die-hard zealots who want to impose their beliefs on the American people.
Considering on-line poker is currently permitted in most of the free world (and a good part of the not-so-free world) it makes me ashamed as an American to have my governments behaving they way they are. The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves.
Teresa, it's hard to imagine that your approach to this - directly ripping off descriptions from the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, looking a few things up on Wikipedia and then napping - could possibly be wrong. But unfortunately, your conclusion ("Internet Poker is bluff on the American gambler. Without the bluff the game evaporates.") is nonsense.
Online poker is a massively successful business in much of the rest of the world, generating upwards of $10 billion in revenue. It will return to the US slowly, most probably with California, New Jersey, Florida and a few other states joining Nevada over the next 2-3 years.
(Also, just for the record, online gaming has never been a $30 billion business; it's closer to $18 billion and is still a vibrant business almost everywhere except for the Middle East and the US. I assume your reference to the money being with promoters has to do with the Full Tilt Poker scandal, which involved about $340 million in player funds.)
Also, a note for boftx - I agree regarding age verification, but not at all regarding collusion. You are correct that B&M poker rooms have never been successful in preventing collusion, but you forget that online poker has an obvious advantage in this area - they get to see all of the cards after they've been played, and have a complete history of every single hand that every player has been involved in. It is, in fact, much easier to spot collusion online than in live poker for this reason alone. Of course, the savvy cheaters know this, so there's a constant cat-and-mouse game going on between the sites and the cheaters. But the truth is that playing online is far safer from a collusion perspective than playing live.
While there will always be people breaking every law in the book, for the most part regulations work. I was an avid online poker player prior to the Bush Administration outlawing it. From that day forward I never played online again because I do my best not to break laws, as do the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Having said that I do believe online gaming has a long ways to go to build trust. Online gaming companies have had their card dealing algorithms cracked, organized team playing on high limit games, and rampant gambling addiction especially by legally aged college students chasing their rookie losses before mom and dad find out.
I stuck to low limit (.05/.10) tables and freeroll (free entry tournaments with cash prizes) and was purely entertainment and training for live play. Keep limits low until solutions are found to the problems I listed. Nevada legislated its way out of mob control, and I feel can legislate online gaming over time to be just a safe and trusted as live gaming.
ultimately, online poker may be killed by computer programers & cheats...
the real time tracking programs that provide a detailed history of every active player's actions; ie. they have your play-book
individual players vs computer programs; ie. the player beside you is not a human, but artificial intelligence and just a chess game
collusinon, by team players sharing hole-card information or by one player having multi-accounts; ie. controlling many chairs at the table
and the security of hole-cards being compromised, either by the programers of the site or by malware trojons
so, I will never know if I'm in a "fair" game, and thus I'll never play
Guaranteed to turn Las Vegas into a ghost town.
I don't want to have to buy a buttload of extra software, for example heads-up displays or player tracking databases in order to get a fair shake in a Nevada online poker game.