For most of Friday afternoon it would have seemed that the apocalypse was upon us, especially if your Twitter and Facebook accounts are as jam-packed with poker players as mine is! Fortunately as the day wore on and more and more details emerged it went from apocalyptic to simply mega-disaster –still really, really, bad, but not end of days bad.

Depending on who you talk to we are looking at either the end of online poker in the United States to simply the loss of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker from the US market. My educated guess on the topic, falls somewhere in the middle of these two scenarios with a slight lean towards the worst case scenario.

What we do know is that PokerStars has outright barred US players from the site, as has Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute/UB Poker has started the process by stopping cash-outs and limiting other access to the site. We also know that the owners of these sites have been indicted on some very serious charges.

The middle of the road scenario seems to be slightly worse than the fallout from the 2006 UIGEA debacle that saw Party Poker and other sites leave the US market, and players wait over a year to receive their money from Neteller thanks to a US government seizure of those funds.

It would seem that all three of these companies are pretty much done in the US market, So, if, IF, the online poker sites decide to make good on their players’ accounts it could be months to years before players actually see that money. The hope is that these sites will continue on in some capacity and not drop from the worldwide market –which would make this process even longer and more drawn out.

Tags: Apocalypse, Apocalyptic, Debacle, Educated Guess, End Of Days, Facebook, Fallout, Friday Afternoon, Full tilt Poker, Government Seizure, Indictments, Online Poker sites, Party Poker, poker players, PokerStars, Twitter, uigea, Us Government, Worldwide Market, Worst Case Scenario

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 16th, 2011 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Fallout from Full Tilt and PokerStars indictments”

1. larry says:

   April 17, 2011 at 2:05 am

   Maybe finally people will understand that the US government and military are criminal organizations. They have yet to verify a single piece of debris from any of the supposed planes of 9-11?!!! The war on terror is a staged fraud just like the WMD’s in Iraq. The same government criminals staged the lies for shutting down this industry. Its all planned and conspired.

   The war on terror is a fraud though you will never see them verify the supposed planes.