California Pushing To Legalize Online Poker in California

May 31, 2010 | Posted by admin

Sen. Rod Wright just recently proposed a bill that would allow California residents to play online poker LEGALLY, but only at California run online poker rooms. The proposal is designed to bring some much needed revenue to the state. Basically it works something like this, if the bill is accepted, up to 3 companies get to bid on contracts to create these new online poker rooms. If it’s signed by the governor it will go into effect immediately, and the bidding / designing process can begin. However, it could possibly take years for the poker sites to actually be up and running due to legal loopholes and government bureaucracy.

Here’s the odd part about the whole thing – with the UIGEA Act going into effect on the First of June, poker players are going to be forced to find new ways to make deposits online (and yes, the poker rooms will find ways to let you deposit, they want your money and know you want to play. Think of it like Prohibition of Alcohol, people like to drink so speakeasy’s came into existence. The more regulations made, the more loopholes people will find around them.) So in California’s proposed bill, Californians must play on the California only poker rooms so California can tax them. So basically your competition would be the exact same guys you currently run into at the Indian Casino, only now you won’t have to leave your house to go talk to them. No more beating people in other parts of the world, nope, just California. It’s a great idea as a concept but without other states signing on, I doubt it’ll see much revenue as players can still just simply go through a loophole to play online at sites such as Full Tilt or Cake, without having their earnings taxed.

I gotta say I think its a really good idea on paper, and I’m glad to see a state finally stepping up to the plate to try and make a goal at legalizing online poker, but at the same time I feel it’s a long way from where it should be. Letting Californians only play against Californians doesn’t sound as much fun. You’ll have way less people online at a time so games will be further and farther between, especially during the wee hours of the night. Good initiative but the execution is far from there. Players want to play when they feel like playing, if you only allow those of us in CA who actually sign up for the CA game, well, the site will suffer from a lack of players and we’ll all head elsewhere.

It’s also worth mentioning that both New Jersey and Florida are looking at introducing similar bills to their states as well. If Florida, New Jersey, and California all teamed up on the same network (similar to say the Cereus Network {consisting of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet}, Cake Network {Cake Poker, Unibomber Poker, Doyle’s Room and many others}, etc where several poker rooms all operate on the same server then they could really have a shot at this as each state would collect the taxes from their states players but you’d actually have a good amount of people playing online at any given time. 3 states playing on one server would be way, way better than each state having their own poker network designed only for their state. Just my two cents on that one.

Currently no taxes are being collected from any of the online poker sites as the US thinks poker is bad and wants to go after the card rooms as a whole. Some states including Washington, have even gone as far as to declare people playing online poker to be Class C Felons, on par with some fairly serious crimes.

Will online poker ever be designated as a legitimate past time activity? In my opinion no. As long as the granny state continues to oversee everything we do and tries to protect us all from the “evils of the world” we’ll continue to see poker deemed a criminal activity only participated in by hooligans, criminals, thieves, rapists, and drug addicts (which couldn’t be further from the truth.)

Anyway to read a more unbiased report of what’s going on head over to California Introduces Internet Poker Bill

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