Anonymous says

Let's hope you're right.

10/02/07

Log in with your TwoRags.com account. Click here to register. Email: Password: Remember log-in information

The proposed regs are out. Here's the 2+2 discussion.

I haven't read these yet and am not planning on it until I get back from vacation, but I've read the thread and looked over the key paragraphs quoted in it. If there's nothing in the .pdf that's missing from the discussion, my initial half-assed legal opinion is that this is a total win and the best case scenario for online poker players as a whole. There's no definition of poker as illegal (I expected this and would have been very surprised if poker was even mentioned in the regs, but that was the worst case outcome); the regs fall back on the state laws surrounding Internet gambling, which further muddies the waters for everybody; and they all but exclude the possibility of a blacklist of ACH processors/merchants.

But wait, there's more; these regs allow banks to expend absolutely no effort on verifying whether an ACH transaction is proper at all, as long as the last foreign entity in the transactional chain says it is. That's basically the ballgame, because all a site has to do to go back to the Neteller, "money in your account ASAP" era is to find a non-US bank willing to make that certification. Moreover, as long as the bank sticks to poker sites and excludes sportsbooks, it's arguably not even doing anything wrong, because it's not violating any federal laws (at least from the Fifth Circuit's point of view, and there's no way the DoJ will ever bring another case on the matter - if the Fifth Circuit [hint: Texas] is that unwilling to give the government's broad definition of the Wire Act any credit, nobody else will, either).

This plus the ongoing WTO saga means a very rosy future for US online poker.