Anybody who has been paying attention to poker recently already knows about the legal actions taken in New York last month against online players. The state decided to freeze the accounts of over 27,000 people who had received money from online poker sites. The Poker Players Alliance claims that the money has been seized while New York simply says that the money is frozen until an investigation is completed.
Whatever the case may be, you’d think that online poker players would be extremely scared to play the game in America. However, this isn’t the case at all and people are still playing poker like crazy in America despite the government’s attempts to scare them away. This was revealed in a study done by Betfair where they found that only 35% of the players in their survey were really concerned about the freezing of poker assets.
This is very surprising to me since the incident was so widely reported on, and it kind of came out of nowhere too. In fact, I don’t think anybody really had a good idea that a state was planning on freezing a bunch of poker money under the guise of a vague law. At least when Kentucky began its crusade against online poker, and gambling in general, there were reports for several weeks prior about what was going to happen.
But still, I think it’s great that people in America aren’t letting these isolated incidents in certain states deter them from playing poker. And if the UIGEA ever gets repealed then we’ll have even less of a reason to fear depositing and withdrawing our money from online poker sites.