BLACK FRIDAY
Poker’s Black Friday…
H
aving been a poker enthusiast and player for nearly 15 years, I can report that it’s been something of a rollercoaster ride. Back in 1999, no one gave a hoot that I played poker. If I wanted to watch it on
TV I had to sit up until 1:15am on a Friday night/Saturday morning to see the one show brave enough to broadcast this niche interest sport, and if I wanted to play online I had only a couple of places to go and very little in the way of options.
By the early 2000s poker life was looking brighter, with WPT (World Poker Tour) proving to be something of a phenomenon as far as televised poker went, and more online sites springing up by the week.
2003 saw amateur poker player, Chris
Moneymaker, turn an online $39 qualification into a $2.5 million payday by winning the main event at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, kicking off what is known as the “Moneymaker Effect”: effectively drawing thousands of new players to the game hoping to repeat his feat. Hundreds of players at the WSOP turned into thousands over the next few years, and the Main Event was boosted by these numbers, ultimately reaching an incredible $12 million first prize by 2006 thanks to 8,772 entrants and their $10,000 buy-ins. Things were good…
Then, in October of 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (or UIGEA) came into being, prohibiting “gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet and that is unlawful under any federal or state law.”
All European-listed poker sites immediately
withdrew from the USA, effectively shutting out American players. Others, such as PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker, positioned poker as a skill game,
68 JUNE 2011
just what happened?
We woke up, we logged on, we found out. A month on from online poker’s infamous ‘Black Friday’, Matt Broughton looks at what actually happened.
exempt from any legislation aimed at illegal online gambling. It was this stance that allowed these three major players to become the market leaders in the years following the passage of the UIGEA.
AND THEN On Friday 15th April 2011, it was announced that
US Attourney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, had filed charges of bank fraud, money laundering and illegal ganbling offenses against 11 defendants and comployees of PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker, along with other individual payment processors and a bank executive.
“It was this stance that allowed these three major players to become the market leaders in the years following the passage of the UIGEA”
PokerStars’ Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate, Full Tilt’s
Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick, and Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet’s Scott Tom and Brent Beckley were accused of having allegedly: “arranged for the money received from US gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants purporting to sell merchandise such as jewelry and golf balls”.
Preet Bharara commented: “As charged, these defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some US banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow in illegal gambling profits. Moreover, as we allege, in their zeal to circumvent the gambling laws, the defendants also engaged in massive money
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