Will online gambling ban be reversed?

Frank Fahrenkopf, the American Gaming Association President, recently stated that if online poker gamblers are certain that they can convince the Congress to approve a rule that would characterize poker as a game of skill, they're surely wrong.

All the poker community, which includes the poker gamblers, online poker rooms and poker publishers, anticipates that the current transformations in congressional management will reverse the impact of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which forced the leading online poker rooms to ban U.S. gamblers, making funding and withdrawing money from online poker accounts more burdensome.

Therefore, a rule which will define poker as a game of skill would excuse online poker from the UIGEA. However, the actual context on Capitol Hill is not encouraging for any pro-Internet gambling legislation.

The AGA supports a congressionally authorized study of online gambling in order to observe if we own the required knowledge in order to certify the fact that gamblers are playing from jurisdictions that allow betting, in order to keep underage players from betting and to limit problem gambling. If the study reveals that the required technology already exists and those protections can be guaranteed, then a law could be passed permitting individual states to make their own decision whether to offer online gambling or not.

Frank Fahrenkopf recognized that even if those two problems are cleared, it is improbable that those states will make tax rates low enough in order to compete with the hardly regulated and taxed casino and poker sites which are actually very successful.