The Online Poker Boom and its Fall

After Moneymaker's unprecedented victory, poker became huge and blew up over night, both in real life and online. Hundreds of thousands of people were hooked on the poker fad, and were shoveling money over to online poker sites to get a piece of the action. Your truly was one of these people, and I have been playing online poker for the past 5 years. For a list of my winnings, click here.



Where's the roof?
With online poker growing exponentially every day, and casinos being overrun by patrons, it seemed like poker was on the fast track to become the next NFL. With world series of poker attendance increase event by event, and with online rooms as much as 50,000 players online at any given moment, online poker was quickly becoming the most popular form of gambling in America. That is until the UIEGA Act was put into play.

What is UIEGA and what does it mean?
The act was placed into effect by the government in an attempt to put sanctions on online gambling, because this form of gambling is difficult to put taxes on. The act itself never mentions poker specifically but it is clear that the online poker boom was the cause of this act. As a result, several online poker rooms, most notably Party Poker, the biggest operator at the time, shut off all services to US players. For the websites that stayed open, namely Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars, it meant that several of the cashing out and depositing options had to be shut down. As of today, a paper check and a lengthy bank transfer are the only ways to get money off of full tilt. To see how the UIEGA Act affected live poker, click here.

Poker hurting itself
However, it must also be noted that while the UIEGA Act is the reason for the start of the fall of online poker, the players themselves are the reason for its continue downswing, and largely the reason that the online poker world has the black eye that it does today. In 2006, the poker world was rocked by the Absolute Poker cheating scandal. The winner of their biggest weekly tournament won it because he was working with an admin in the system, meaning that he could see his opponents hole cards. This left the online poker world reeling, and it was just the first of many cheating scandals to come. In 2007, the winner of the biggest tournament in the online community, the main even of the World Championship of Online Poker, was disqualified for using multiple accounts, and his win of 1.2 million dollars was voided, ironic for a player named The V0id. The icing on the cake occurred earlier this year, when it was learned that professional poker pro Russ Hamilton was behind cheating in his multiple cash game wins. 60 minutes recently did a report on these scandals. You can find it here.



Where do we go from here
With the Bush administration on the way out, there is word that they will try to institute various sanctions that the Obama administration would not be able to overturn. This would put a huge damper on online poker, especially since Obama is an open poker fan. In the meantime, poker players all over the country will be on pins and needles waiting to here if what their future is, and whether the online pros will have to make their livings in the casinos alone.