The long arm of government interference has finally caught up with me. Even though it is not illegal to play poker online from the United States, my preferred online poker site has in the last 24 hours figured out that I’m in the US and because of the moralizing anti-gambling fuckwits in the government they’ve blocked me from playing and from retrieving my money off the site. The last time they did this all I had to do was change my address on file to a fictitious one in Canada. Now I need to make their computers believe that my computer is in Canada.
Note again that it is NOT illegal in the United States to play poker online.
Search google for public proxy servers, read the instructions on how to set up your browser to use it and then pick one from Canada. This will work. I don’t know if online poker programs can use a proxy or not but try it with that too.
Note that depending upon the particular proxy server, you most likely will find your transfer rate to be slower–possibly MUCH slower. If you need speed, there are premium proxy services available which you pay for, but the transfer rates are generally much faster.
Hey, would you look at this, the WTO has yet again ruled against the US and its stupid internet gambling rules. Not that the US cares what Antigua thinks but this may draw the EU into it and scare the shit out of the government pinheads.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the crucial part of the ruling is that the US allows gambling on horses. I suspect that online poker gambling is illegal in the US and they must have the right to do that. Can a Moslem country get sued because they don’t allow liquor companies to ply their wares freely in said country? Anyway, what makes you think that the US would give two hoots if the EU put in sanctions against the US? What would they do, put duties on US cars? See the history of the dispute with Canada over softwood lumber. Although Canada won every round of the determination and appeal process, the US simply ignored it. Eventually, they returned 4/5 of the tarrifs they had illegally collected in return for an agreement limiting the import. This is free trade?
Online gambling is not illegal under current US law. The government hangs its hat on the 1961 Federal Wire Act and the highest court which has ruled on it, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled that it applies only to sports betting. The recently passed in the dead of night federal legislation does not, according to every analysis I’ve read, make online gambling illegal. Instead, it seeks to choke off the money supply by making it illegal for US banks and credit cards to transfer funds to online gambling sites. Thing is, most if not all credit cards already blocked such transactions well before the law passed, and every site already offers non-direct deposits through third-party companies like Neteller. If some of the online poker sites weren’t pussies, they would do like a number of the British-based companies have done and tell the US to piss off with its regulations since once money hits a non-US bank US banking regulations are kind of unenforceable.
What really pisses me off about this is that the site that’s blocked me is Hollywood Poker, whose entire gimmick is that it gives people the chance to play with celebrities. I somehow doubt that the B-listers who play on the site are doing so from outside the US so the prohibition on US players is completely arbitrary and stupid.
While you may not, IYHO, be violating the “playing poker from the U.S.” thingy, you would be asking people to conspire to help you avoid U.S. banking laws, IMHO.