Legal US Poker Sites – US Poker Sites for Real Money
Online Poker in the United States
Im not going to bore you with every aspect as to why some people still believe online poker is illegal but state what I have been saying for the past 3 years. It is 110% LEGAL to play online poker if you are in the United States as a player. Ask the Poker Players Alliance, whom lobby against corruption and they will tell you exactly the same thing. It’s a myth they are trying to dispell like the plague. Poker sites and financial banking institutions are the ones who can get into trouble for taking US deposits but for the most part, a lot of them stayed.
Legal US Online Poker Sites
1. Poker Stars
Where We Stand Now
I’m writing this article in 2009 after extensive research into this subject, 3 years to be exact. I’ve followed it every day and even blogged about it hourly on some days to the constant changes.
Where we stand today is basically where we stand 3 years ago. People are still playing poker legally online, just at designated poker sites. While depositing was supposed to get harder with the passage of the UIGEA (which made a lot of sites back out of the US) it in fact just made the poker rooms adjust and come up with more and faster deposit methods.
Withdraws are still simple with paper checks, ewallets, and echecks. People continue to deposit vastly with credit cards and something called echecks which continue to be the easiest to use. Before you were forced to register with something called Neteller and do all sorts of verification and weeks later you could play. Now it’s not that hard.
Im not saying things are all fine and dandy as poker sites that accept US players still have the minor hiccup for the US Department of Justice but for the most part business continues, it’s just not “as usual” as it was before.
What Do Lawyers Think about Legality?
You can find 100’s of articles on this subject but Im positive you won’t find better information than here, or maybe some other sites that I own. We’ve contacted several online gaming legal experts and the exact same thing comes up. It isn’t illegal to play poker from the United States.
We have multiple organizations fighting for our cause including the Poker Players Alliance and iMEGA. They both stand to de-censor the internet and let poker players do as they please.
So What is Illegal?
Sportsbetting is the forbidden fruit of online gambling. It is the only game among the top 4 types of gambling sites, ie: the 4 quads as I call them (poker, casino, sportsbetting and bingo) that it is in fact illegal to gamble. That is of course the sportsbetting is not state run. Go figure huh. What’s ironic is that sportsbetting can be considered by most punters as a game of skill and therefore should be legal. There is something called the Wire Act that made online sportsbetting illegal but ironically it made playing online poker not. Why? Well it considers sportsbetting “illegal internet gambling” and does not state poker or casinos as “illegal internet gambling”. In fact it does not mention poker or casinos at all, yet the Department of Justice continues to cite this Act as to why poker is illegal, falsely of course.
Where Did All This Legal / Illegal Stuff Come From?
It came about in late 2006 when a couple of corrupt Senators decided to shadily pass leglislation called the UIGEA which said it was illegal for financial institutions to knowingly accept deposits or withdraws to online gaming sites that were deemed “illegal”.
When I say corrupt you will see why if you google, “corrupt senator” in google. The first guy to pop his ugly head is the man by the name of Bill Frist, coincidently the man in charge of getting this legislation passed. Now everyone knows how corrupt the government is and yet somehow this guy is in charge of trying to shut down gambling sites online? Just to show how shady it is, Harrah’s was a major lobby to shut down the gambling sites back then putting money towards the efforts. Now that many gambling sites are having financial troubles they are in fact lobbying to get online gambling legal again! They even hired CEO’s from Partygaming to head their online divisions. Partygaming backed out of the US market and there is speculation that once gambling is legal in the US, they will buy Partygaming out. Cut the legs from underneath poker sites then buy them out, that was there plan and it is working to a tee.
Anyways hopefully from this article you can gather for yourself what is legal and illegal and continue to fight for your rights as US poker players. One place to start is the PokerPlayersAlliance.org