Black Friday: How the Feds Shut Down Online Poker

Gambling is now one of the big business for every one and there are lots of people losses or earn money from playing online game.

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Great information. Thank you for shedding light on this story! I'm glad you are providing information on the tragedy that was our Black Friday. It is well past time to license and regulate this industry in the US. Most of the world is able to play this game of skill and strategy online and Americans, of all people, should be free to play as well.

This article is journalistically shabby and, frankly, would be laughed out of any college journalism course.

1. It merely gives us anecdotal accounts of people who have managed to make online poker work, but it does not discuss how many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc, may have lost substantial sums gambling online.

2. It blithely blames the religious nuts for the shutdown of online poker in the U.S. However, there is zero direct evidence provided in this article of this. There are no statements, for example, from the usual suspects in the evangelical or other faith based crowds. Mere name calling with no evidence is not journalism.

3. It is fine to go after Kyl and Frist, two clowns who I don't particularly like myself, for this, but where this article REALLY fails is to discuss if there was any Abramoff-style lobbying by casinos in the U.S. to have their online competitors taken out. To read this article, it was almost as if Kyl and Frist just one day got up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to take it out on online poker sites. Now the combination of this kind of lobbying, if it happened, and pressure from the religious nutbars could have been the hammer that made the crackdown happen, but this piece just does not give us any clear picture as to whether that is, in fact, what happened.

4. The article thus reads too much like it was written by a public relations firm for the online providers. The online poker sites are cast, in a very simple way, as victims here without any sense of skepticism on the part of the writer that the truth may be more complex than that. Consequently, this article is little more than glorified spam---Make Money Gambling Online! should have been the real header here.

One of the things dogging the mainstream media is that it has gotten so lazy it often rips, reads and reprints corporate press releases as worthy news articles when they are anything but. The L.A. Weekly has thus fallen into that same lazy habit, or so it appears.

- Thanks for this informative article about online poker and what the government did to it. An entire industry was destroyed last year. This is the first article that really illustrates the situation. We need federal legislation that licenses and regulates online poker in the U.S. and brings back an industry. -

Mr.Parker:

You really, REALLY don't get it.

When someone builds a car, or grows some wheat, or performs a cabaret act on the Sunset Strip, there is an exchange of cash for goods and/ or services. Gambling is not like that. It is not an "industry" employing people as you suggest, it's nothing more than shuffling money around from one set of hands to another, with no product or service provided. If one person such as Walter Wright, Maxwell Fritz or Michael Minkoff can make enough money from their activities to provide for a lavish lifestyle, it's because they understand card counting or some other version of an inside track that is sapping the life from other households-- there is no free lunch. If someone gets rich by building fancy furniture, or selling push-up bras or cleaning carpets, it's because someone got something in exchange for that money; when Mr. Fritz gets rich playing cards, it is only because someone else is getting poor playing with him, thinking he, too, can ride a gravy train. But whenever anyone wins in gambling, it's because someone else is losing... and getting nothing out of the deal but a bit closer to bankruptcy, or divorce, or Gambler's Anonymous.

When I buy junk food from a fair-- cotton candy, as in the story-- it might eventually give me diabetes, but I at least get something for my money. All I might get from Mr. Fritz is the wrong lesson-- that I need to learn to play better, and waste my money on Mr. Minkoff's books so that next time, Mr. Fritz will be the one who can't pay his mortgage, not myself.

There is no winning in gambling... not overall. There is only money shifted from one soulless sap's pocket to another.

These men are all obvuously more intelligent than normal in some way or another. I hope that Fritz and others like him can use their greater ken of numbers, averages, odds or whatever to find other outlets for their talents that actually provide benefits for someone besides themselves-- that's the difference between win-win, and win-lose. It's also what defines personal satisfaction-- when you're getting someone else's money because you're helping him, it's much easier to sleep at night than knowing you have his money just because you beat him AND HIS FAMILY with a deck of cards.

Only the government and large banks are allowed to run shady financial schemes.

That's a very informative article about what happened to online gambling. I like your work, Chris Parker. To any law makers paying attention: I favor legalizing online poker; I vote.