Online poker bubble has burst

Online poker used to be one of the most popular
distractions in the United States. There were nearly two
million people playing in their homes or at their offices
at the height of the game in 2010. Those players bet
around $18 billion in friendly games and tournaments
online that year.

But 2010 was the year Washington’s Supreme Court upheld
the law passed by the Legislature that made betting online
a felony, and then last year, a federal court in New York
basically shut-down the biggest online poker sites, and
indicted several members of Full Tilt poker for stealing
the winnings of players.

Online wagers in the U.S. have fallen 83-percent since
then.

Lee Rousso loves poker and used to play all the time.
He’s also the attorney that fought the new Washington law,
but lost at the Supreme Court. He told MyNorthwest.com he
doesn’t know a single person any more who risks playing
online.

“I don’t understand the attraction right now,” he
said. “It seems like most of the fun would have been
squeezed out of it by now with the dark cloud of
illegality hanging over it. I can’t imagine that the
people that are playing are having that much fun, but they
must like the game. I like the game too. I’d like to
play again.”

But Rousso said the game is growing outside the U.S. where
it’s still legal. “There’s been tremendous growth,
particularly in Asia over the last several years,” he
said. “The Hong Kong market. Internet poker is big in
Australia, Taiwan, and Japan. There’s a lot of growth in
Latin America and South America, and in Europe, Internet
poker is doing extremely well.”

Rousso believes the love of the game is still here in the
U.S. and players would come back in droves if the
government would decide to regulate the industry and not
make it illegal and threaten to prosecute players. He
said several states are looking at setting up their own
online sites that would be tightly regulated but legal.

“In the next couple of years, people will be playing
intra-state Internet poker in the United States.” Rousso
said California and Nevada are working on ways to use the
state lottery system for online poker play.

And if there’s any question that poker is still a passion
in this country, a World Series of Poker event just wrapped
up in Las Vegas Tuesday night with the winner taking home
a record $18.3 million pay-out.