Nearly a decade after the U.S. Department of Justice seized popular poker website domains, like the PokerStars Black Friday incident. The founder of PokerStars has plead guilty to gambling charges, but what lies ahead for him? Plus sports betting news from Washington State, are also discussed.
Well my friends, here we are again… week three of a global lock down as the world battles this damn Coronavirus! We don’t have martial law yet, but hey at this point nothing would surprise me! And what could be bigger news than that? How about a 73 year old man that the US government wants to put in prison for five years over something that happened a decade ago! Yeah!
This week’s big story centers around the PokerStars Black Friday incident, as their founder, Isai Scheinberg, has pleaded guilty to running an illegal online gambling operation in New York federal court… all stemming from Black Friday back in 2011. Black Friday, you may recall, was the day that the US Department of Justice seized the domains of the four largest online poker rooms, claiming they were operating illegally under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.
The UIGEA is a federal law that many people believe criminalizes all online gambling and America. In fact, if you ask the feds they’ll practically swear that it does! But technically… technically… that’s not true. Besides having generous carve-outs for online horse-racing and fantasy sports, the UIGEA only criminalizes, and I quote… “a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet and that is unlawful under any federal or state law“. And that, my friends, is a very important distinction… and here’s why.
You see the Wire Act and the Travel Act are both federal laws from 1961 that some have argued, unsuccessfully, outlaw online gambling in America. But how can laws written in 1961 envision and outlaw something 35 years in the future? That means there must be an underlying state law in order to prosecute someone using the UIGEA… and that brings us back to Mr. Scheinberg… and that brings us back to New York state where…. guess what!
New York Penal Law 225 says that a person is guilty of promoting gambling if they profit from unlawful gambling… a term that is bantered about quite a few times within the statute… but I will be damned if I can find a definition for unlawful gambling within the statute itself! So, I’m left to speculate that basically unlawful gambling is any gambling in which the state does not profit from…. I mean, regulate!
So there you have it my friends. The feds want to lock up a 73 year old man under New York state law for doing something that New York State is currently trying to regulate. All while using the ambiguous term “unlawful gambling”… which does beg the question: Is poker really gambling at all? Or a game of skill? And that, my friends, is the topic of a whole different video!
Finally this week, a while back I told you that Washington State was considering the regulation of sports betting. At that time, I said that I felt it was a long shot based on all the hoops they had to jump through and the limited amount of time they had left in the legislative session.
Well smack my ass and call me Shirley! Those crazy kids actually pulled it off! And very soon you’ll be able to bet on sports legally in Washington State, but only at tribal casinos. Also, there’s a lot of other sports betting stuff going on across America, way too much for me to cover, but you can find all of those stories, including more coverage of the PokerStars Black Friday case, when you visit us at This Week in Gambling.
