Poker industri bad beat

Many sites are shutting down

The events are just getting worse and worse

One of the largest events ever to unfold in the online gambling industry has just taken place a few weeks ago, in a day that has since been called “Black Friday”. It consisted of the shutdown of four large online poker sites – some of the largest, most respected and reputable poker rooms in the world. The Full Tilt Poker shut down came as a complete shock to everybody, as nobody expected such a large, influential online poker site to be involved in dubious activities. The PokerStars shut down came as an equally large shock to players, as they wouldn’t have expected the largest online poker room in the world to be hunted by the FBI.

It all started in the morning of Friday, the 14^th of April, when the first users of Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, UB Poker and PokerStars were reporting that they couldn’t access the homepages of these poker rooms. Instead of the usual content, they were greeted by an eerie message from the FBI and the United States Department of Justice, saying that the domain names had been seized due to “illegal gambling activities”. Everybody started to talk, rumors started to spread, and it was eventually known that these online poker sites were under investigation by the American authorities for fraud. To put it short, they were accused of lying to the banks regarding where their money came from, and not declaring them to be in any way gambling related.

Ever since that day, these poker sites have been totally closed to everybody that’s in the United States, and the situation doesn’t seem likely to change, especially in the current legislative climate. So, the only solution for online poker players that relied on these sites to get by is to find another place where to practice their favorite activities.

It seems that this whole investigation was boosted by one event, triggered exactly one year before: in 2010, Australian internet “whiz” Daniel Tzvetkoff was arrested in Las Vegas, where he was attending a gambling convention. He was thought to be the “brains” behind the fraud conducted by the accused companies, and once faced with no less than 75 years in prison, he decided the best course of action for him would be to cooperate with the authorities.

Now, no less than 11 people have been indicted – these are members of the PokerStars board of directors, and even the Full Tilt Poker CEO. They each face up to 30 years in federal prison, as well as a million dollars in fines. No matter what happens next, one thing is for sure: on Black Friday, the online poker world was shaken to its very core by the largest poker scandal ever to unfold in this industry.

And how does this affect you? Well, if you’re within the United States, you cannot play on any of these sites. If you’re not, you can say goodbye to your American poker friends sitting at the same table as you, at least on these websites.

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