Home / Poker News October 2011 / The Poker Grapevine – Congressional Hearing on Online Poker
The Poker Grapevine – Congressional Hearing on Online Poker
Posted by: Jo Martin - Sat, 2011-10-22 10:59
For the umpteenth time, the issue of online poker is about to get some Congressional attention: the US House of Representatives Subcommittee for Commerce Manufacturing and Trade will hold a hearing regarding the possible legalization of online poker. Congressman Joe Barton’s HR 2366 (also known as the
Online Poker Act of 2011) will also be the subject of discussions. Joe Barton is one of the subcommittee members. In the wake of the news, the PPA has reached out to its members whose representatives are subcommittee members, asking players to contact them directly and to ask them to support the cause.
The PPA will also get its lobbying team to meet with subcommittee members to drum up as much support as possible before the discussions commence.
In other news: overall online poker traffic has seen a little bit of an uptick in recent days, mostly due to traffic surge at PokerStars. The
online poker site has held its first Double Vision Sunday, which saw prize-pools exceed a total of $4 million in the Sunday Million and the Sunday Warm-Up.
Unfortunately, the general decline of the overall traffic was obvious in the fact that 6 of the 10 biggest online poker sites have posted traffic losses over the past week.
The Merge Gaming Network has reopened for new US players, and that obviously drew a little bit of extra traffic too. The Merge gain is said to be around 7% but according to day-by-day numbers it may actually be around 15%.
In still other news:
PokerStars have launched their Time Tourneys, in another attempt to spice up the online poker scene and to attract more traffic. The new tournament format differs from traditional poker tournaments in several ways: Time Tourneys don’t actually play down to a winner. Instead, players hack away at each-others’ stacks for a set period of time, after which the prize-pool is divided among the survivors, according to how big their stacks are.
