Thunderstruck: The Day It All Changed for Online Poker

Am sitting here in a hotel room in Lima, Peru with my fellow bloggers. Having finished our work at Day 2 of the LAPT Lima event, we’re now eating some dinner and discussing the implications of what has happened today.

I don’t even have to say what, right? Each of us were getting messages all day, from all over, asking if we had heard.

Oh, yeah. We did.

Obviously everything has changed in a major way -- for online poker (both in the U.S. and elsewhere), for poker generally speaking, and, of course, all of the various fields that make up the industry of which we are a part. And for which we’re working here.

Have only barely begun to start acquainting myself with details of today’s indictment of the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and others, the U.S. government’s seizure of the domains (pokerstars.com, fulltiltpoker.com, ub.com. ultimatebet.com, absolutepoker.com), the subsequent shutting out of American customers from the real money games on these sites, the civil suit, and everything else.

Scarlet Robinson gives a great rundown of the primary details on Pokerati, if you’re looking for such. There’s still so much for us to read and digest (including the indictment) as we continue to try to inform ourselves about it all.

I found myself today thinking about the post I wrote a week ago titled “Some Rambling About the Rumble (Online Poker in the U.S.).” There I alluded to the several business alliances involving online poker sites that were being announced -- alliances which today are apparently no more -- as well as the various online poker-related bills being discussed on both the state and federal level.

My conclusion was fairly non-conclusive, noting simply that it seemed that “something” was about to happen, probably sooner than later. I compared all of these machinations to “a distant storm -- a lot of noise, but still close enough that if something were to happen we wouldn’t be totally taken by surprise.”

I avoided expressing optimism there, partly because I didn’t feel as though I understood enough of what was happening to do so confidently. But I won’t lie -- like many, I was hardly thinking of any such negative turn as what has happened today. And when I said we wouldn’t be “surprised” if something were to happen, given all the “rumbling” that was going on, I obviously wasn’t thinking of something like this.

Which, it is clear, took just about everyone by surprise. Even if it shouldn’t have.

We’re gonna think on this some more. You do the same.