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A senior Democratic lawmaker will push legislation this year to repeal a U.S. ban on Internet gambling that has hurt trade ties with the European Union, a congressional aide said.

“The bill introduction should happen in the next month,” a spokesman for House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

On Thursday, Reuters reported the EU could file a complaint about U.S. enforcement of the gambling ban at the World Trade Organization. [Read more →]

Tags:   Barney Frank · EU · partygaming · uigeaNo Comments.

The problem is with the UIGEA is that it has reclassified New Hampshire state lottery purchases made by credit or debit card as “betting, casino and gaming” transactions. Such sales used to be filed under “government service” by the big card makers, Visa and MasterCard.

U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu complained a year ago that the law was ambiguous and was grabbing legitimate enterprises in its net. He warned that “risk-averse financial institutions will simply choose to block every transaction that may be interpreted or could resemble gambling, whether legal or not.”
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Tags:   John E. Sununu · New Hampshire · uigea1 Comment

Tags:   Isle of Man · Malta · partygaming · Poker StarsNo Comments.

Kentucky authorities want to seize 140 Internet domain names, saying the web sites bring illegal gambling within the borders of the commonwealth.

Attorneys for a trade association for the gambling web sites countered that Kentucky lacks the authority to make that move because the domain names aren’t property and, besides, they are based offshore and beyond Kentucky’s jurisdiction.

A three-judge appeals court panel in Kentucky is now weighing whether a state can seized a web site domain name to curtail gambling within its borders, even if it means cutting the rest of the world off from the site.

The question arose after Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate ruled in October that the state’s lawsuit seeking to block Kentuckians’ access to more than 140 online casinos could go forward. Wingate also ruled that he planned to hold a hearing about whether the state could seize the web sites.

The hearing has not been held pending the outcome of the appeal heard Friday. [Read more →]

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Collaboration by two of the world’s most respected news organizations reveals how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That’s because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.

The results of the four-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and The Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul will appear this Sunday, Nov. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.

“He was raising, just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy,” says Todd Witteles, a computer scientist turned poker player who believed he was losing too much to the same person. “It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn’t losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day,” Witteles, who played a key detective role, remembers.

Michael Josem, a player and a computer security expert, plotted the odds of such consistent success. “We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean…approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times.”

The cheating, which netted the cheaters more than $20 million, occurred on two of the Internet’s most popular sites, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The two sites operate out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica and run their games on computer servers housed on an Indian reservation outside of Montreal. They are licensed by a Mohawk tribe that has no background in casino gambling, a tribe that previously made the majority of its money selling tax-free tobacco. Though such gambling is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., the betting laws in those countries have no jurisdiction on the sovereign reservation.

Tags:   Absolute Poker · cheating · internet gambling · ultimate betNo Comments.