For anyone unaware there’s a good chance some online poker legislation will be pushed through at the federal level in the next week and a half and it will surely shake things up quite a bit. Here are some cliffs courtesy of NoahSD on 2+2
Originally Posted by NoahSD
My attempt at cliffs:
The Congress is currently in a lame duck session. Basically a bunch of Dems got voted out, but there’s a 1.5 month window where they’re still in control. That window’s likely to end in about a week and a half, so they’re trying to get some stuff through before the reps take over.
In particular, Senator Reid (majority leader of the senate, so a powerful dude) is considering attaching a bill to license and regulate online poker (only poker) to other legislation that’s almost definitely going to pass. The most likely target is a bill to extend tax cuts that the Dems and Reps have been negotiating over since the election. Nobody’s really sure how likely this is to actually happen, as it’s likely to be an unpopular move if the Reps decide to make a big deal out of it. However, there’s been very little resistance so far.
An old draft of the bill has leaked, and obviously the gist of it is to license and regulate online poker, which basically everyone wants obv. Some of the details are also pretty positive–the tax is a 20% revenue tax, which consensus suggests is really small and would be more likely to lead to lower rakes than higher rakes.
However, there are some pretty huge negatives that are causing some people to argue that this bill could be worse than the status quo. Probably the biggest is a 15-month “blackout” in which no sites would be allowed to legally serve the US. If this ends up in the bill and the bill passes, the consensus is that the more “legit” sites like Stars and FTP will pull out of the US market and wait to get licenses. Sites that pretty much have no chance of getting a license like Bodog will probably stick around.
It’s not clear whether or not the blackout will be in the bill and if it is if it will be 15 months. TheEngineer has said they’re still negotiating this point and trying to get rid of it or make it a shorter time period or whatever.
Non-US players won’t be allowed to play on US-based sites. So that would be something like the equivalent of Stars.fr and FTP.fr. A while from now, they might be allowed in, but the default is no. Stars and FTP will have no reason to stop serving non-US players during the blackout, but of course during the blackout they’ll have basically no US players if this happens, so that’ll hurt their traffic a ton I imagine.
You can follow the most up to date version of the thread here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/57/poker-legislation/reid-pushing-plan-legalize-u-s-online-gambling-930754/