Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Although Macau is considered to be the poker capital of Asia, its neighbor Hong Kong does not permit it. It is illegal for gamers to play poker games like Texas hold ‘Em and Omaha anywhere in Hong Kong, and anyone caught gambling will have to face serious fines, as was the case with a group of poker players who were caught playing an underground game of poker. The only forms of gambling allowed in Honk Kong are horse race betting, the lottery and football betting. The Hong Kong Jockey Club operates all three betting establishments.

Seven poker players including a banker from Merrill Lynch, were arrested by the Chinese police for playing Texas hold ‘Em poker in Hong Kong and over HKD $153,000 in cash and HKD $3.7 million in chips were also seized. All seven poker players were high profile businessmen and numbered two bankers in their group, along with two investment consultants, a businessman, a bank teller and two company directors. The whole group was arrested and required to pay a lofty fine; also taken into custody were four young women who ran the underground poker parlor, two of whom were locals and two other who were Nepalese.

Michael Tan Boon Suan, from the Merrill Lynch bank is also a New Zealand national and is 42 years old. All seven gamblers were arrested for illegal gaming in the country and now face a sentence of 3 months in jail and a fine of HKD $10,000. This condition is only if the players are first time offenders as the sentence may be stronger should they have previous arrests.

All seven players did not show up in court for their hearing but arranged to be granted bail for the sum of HK$1,000. Their cases are now scheduled to be heard next month and during September.

Jason Young, 2008 WSOP bracelet winner, has been complaining about the reliability of online poker games. Also known as “JBY,” Young has gone on to make some really strong statements claiming that there is “some theme” that is wrong with these online poker games.

Despite the fact that Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer made their way to the WSOP by playing online poker games and getting in via an online satellite tournament, Jason Young appears to doubt the integrity of an online poker game.

Young went on to play the blame game and pointed to the entire system, “I have chalked up losing sessions and all that to variance in the past, but someone needs to explain to me how this is even possible.”

His reasons for this being that he has lost $35,000 within two days of playing online poker, believing that something must be wrong with the system. Taking into consideration that hundreds of poker players, many of whom have participated in the WSOP and placed in the money, are frequent online poker players prone to win money while playing, make Young’s statements sound like nothing but the tirade of a player on a bad losing streak. Perhaps Young has lost his edge or may have underestimated the skill levels of online poker players he is competing against.

Young does state that he has not played much online poker and appears to be baffled that he is losing while playing poker online, and doing it frequently. Young tried his hand at online poker in an effort to improve his game, but ended up disappointed with the results and proceeded to vent his anger in a blog, stating, “They are trying to jam it in me around every corner. The biggest joke ever…. I’m literally steaming while I right this…Broken computer and all…I’ve been playing $500/$1K heads up Hold’em, o8 and Omaha Hi the past 2 days I have lost to 2 outers no less than 50 times. I’m not kidding.”

Much to the happy surprise of poker players all across America, Congressman Barney Frank’s HR2267 bill got the green light from Federal lawmakers yesterday.

The HR2267 bill, which has been strongly supported by poker players like Annie Duke and Andy Bloch, and had the full strength of the Poker Players Alliance behind it, secured a margin of 41 votes for it and 22 votes against it. The bill eventually garnered the approval of the House Financial Services Committee, although the organization first instituted a total of 14 amendments in Frank’s original bill. The bill was then passed by lawmakers and is expected to spurt on growth in the online gambling industry when it brings back American revenue to online casinos.

This bill which legalizes internet gambling and games like online poker in the US also permits American players to transact with foreign online casinos. The bill also attempts to regulate online gambling and has instituted a good system of laws to protect minors from gambling online.

Surprisingly, one the amendments in the bill included the exclusion of any online gaming sites that were in present violation of existing Internet gambling laws. This amendment apparently helped the votes swing in favour of the bill as it would appear that some representatives were in favour of cutting out sites like Full Tilt and PokerStars from being granted licenses to operate in the US in the future.

Some of the other amendments made to the HR2267 bill included restrictions for players, setting an age bar of a minimum of 21 years and imposing regulations to see that gamblers with problems or gaming addicts would not be encouraged by the casinos. These rules covered casinos not receiving funds from child support payments and not accepting credit card deposits. The bill also called for a statistics database and established US casino licensing laws.

After a successful hearing on the 21st of July, the House Financial Services Committee appears to be looking favorably on Barney Frank’s HR 2267 bill, which aims to legalize and regulate internet gambling in the US and permit American players and bettors to place wagers with foreign casinos and gaming sites. The presence of five strong poker personalities at the hearing may have had a lot to do with the success of the HR 2267, which has led to it being pushed for a mark up, a few days after the hearing.

Annie Duke, the outspoken “Poker Duchess” represented the Pokers Players Alliance and stated that the HR 2267 provided adult gamers the freedom to play an entertaining game online. “At its most basic level, the issue before this committee is personal freedom, the right of individual Americans to do what they want in the privacy of their homes without the intrusion of the government.”

She also commented on the UIGEA saying, “The UIGEA is not about consumer protection. It’s a banking law. I hit that point so many times. There’s no protection for consumers.”

Other speakers present at the hearing included Ed Williams from the Credit Union National Association, Lynn Malerba who was there on behalf of the Mohegan Tribe, Tom Malkasian from the Commerce Casino and Michael Fagan, who was there to discuss the legal aspects of the bill.

Like Duke, Williams also put the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act under fire and claimed that it had caused too much of compliance costs. He also brought out the ambiguity of the UIGEA as it exists stating that it did not define “unlawful internet gambling” leaving too much of room for subjective interpretation. He also commented on the difficulty the bill had put US financial institutions under.

Currently, the HR 2267, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act is due for a mark up and review on July 27th, where it will be edited, amended and voted on. The mark up is process that readies a new bill for the floor by clearly defining its tenets, and it is only after this that a bill can be implemented as a law.

If the HR 2267 bill is passed after the mark up, online poker would become legal in the US and this has the gaming community awaiting it with eager anticipation. Fagan and Malkasian are in favour of legalizing online poker, but believe the bill should be amended before being put on the floor.

It was Chris Moneymaker who almost single handedly (pun intended) created the boom in the online poker industry, when he won the World Series of Poker 2003 championship by making his way to the final table via a satellite poker game from an online casino. This put online poker on the map and saw a boom in poker player traffic across online casinos and poker sites on the web, and, when Greg Raymer repeated this phenomenon and won the WSOP 2004, the splurge in player traffic caused a sudden increase in the number of poker portals and online casinos between 2003 and 2004.

Today, some of these past WSOP winners have dropped off the radar as they have not been able to recover their lucky streak, while others have gone on to make even more millions.

Moneymaker, for instance has not managed to increase his bankroll beyond a few thousands since 2003, despite participating in WSOP events. His current winnings are only ranked at $2,937,439.

After accomplishing a spectacular win of about $5,000,000 in the WSOP 2004 and proving to the world for a second time that online poker could indeed make you rich, Raymer seems to have kept his edge. Raymer has placed in the money at several other WSOP events and has built a bankroll of $6,850,000. Joe Hachem who won the WSOP 2005 has also seen a lot of success since then.

Jamie Gold, on the other hand, who took the 2006 WSOP Title and won $12 million, has added a mere pittance to his bankroll, accumulating a little over $100,000 since his win. Jerry Yang, the 2007 WSOP winner and Joe Cada, winner of the 2009 event have also not done very well for themselves and seem to be slipping away off the radar. Peter Eastgate, who won the 2008 event however, has continued with his successes and has participated in several poker tournament events, while building up a notable bankroll.

Just last week, we reported that PokerStars has been playing host to a ring of colluding players from China. It seems that now they’ve busted a ring of bots, too. Once again, players are complaining about how long it took the PokerStars staff to figure out who the bots are and to get rid of them.

According to PokerStars figures, the ten bots played a total of at least 8 million hands and they managed to earn $57,000. A PokerStars representative posted to the popular 2+2 poker forum explaining that initially members of the ring were suspected of collusion, but eventually that suspicion was dropped. PokerStars did not, however, drop the investigation. Instead, they looked at the account’s irregularities, compared it to other accounts, and discovered a total of ten accounts that were being played by bots.

Players complained that once PokerStars ascertained that the accounts were bot accounts, PokerStars did not immediately close them. According to a statement from a PokerStars spokesman, the staff wanted to make sure that they had found all of the accounts in the ring before closing accounts, as they didn’t want to “spook” the other account holders and cause them to withdraw their funds before the accounts were found.

The PokerStars representative explained that “PokerStars takes its commitment to bot detection and removal extremely seriously, and will continue to do so, both behind the scenes with our tools (which are under constant review and improvement), and in response to player-generated suspicions. Most player reports of bot suspicions are false alarms, but we still investigate each one thoroughly, and when they actually do locate a previously undetected bot, appropriate action will always be taken.”

It is unclear how much money was won illegally and how much will need to be paid back to players. It is also unclear how much of the money won by the bots was cashed out prior to the freezing of the accounts.