Home / Poker News April 2012 / Online Poker’s Black Friday – 365 Days without Poker
Online Poker’s Black Friday – 365 Days without Poker
Posted by: Randy Williams - Sun, 2012-04-15 16:30
Exactly a year ago, the legal boom was lowered on online poker when the DoJ indicted the three biggest online poker operators: Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and the Cereus network sites: Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The result of Black Friday was the shutting down of all online poker operations for US players and the locking up of all player funds at Full Tilt Poker. As a matter of fact,
PokerStars was the only operator which managed to pay back all its US players and restart operations for its non-US player base. Full Tilt Poker is currently in the process of being sold to French conglomerate Groupe Bernard Tapie, a move which would see US players recover their monies and non-US players allowed to start playing again. The charges brought by the DoJ were mainly based on the 2006 UIGEA, but also on the 1955 Illegal Gambling Business Act.
A total of 11 people were named in the indictment: PokerStars’ Isai Sheinberg and Paul Tate, Full Tilt Poker’s Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick, Brent Beckley, Scott Tom, Ryan Lang and Bradley Franzen, as well as the now famous payment processors Chad Elie and John Campos.
Black Friday had another dimension to it as well: 75 bank accounts belonging to the various online poker operators have been seized and 5 internet domains were taken over by the US authorities too.
The bottom line about Black Friday is that it pretty much crippled the online poker industry, setting it on a downward spiral from which it hasn’t been able to recover since. Online poker traffic numbers have dropped pretty much every month since Black Friday.
Even though several potentially significant moves were made since last year towards legalized and regulated online poker, Black Friday certainly looks like the US land-based casino industry’s first strike against the existing establishment, a strike aimed at clearing a path for the new US-based operators likely to surface as soon as online poker is regulated.
