Fade to Black (Friday)

Today marks four years since “Black Friday,” the day the U.S. Department fo Justice unsealed its indictment and civil complaint targeting the world’s three biggest online poker sites, temporarily seizing domains and subsequently shutting the U.S. out of the global online poker game.

Was looking back today through the last few posts noting anniversaries of the occasion.

One year after Black Friday I was marking the date by looking back, revisiting the story of my being in Lima, Peru when everything went down (like, really went down).

Two years after Black Friday I was covering a tournament in nearby Cherokee and was thus distracted from writing about the occasion, belatedly turning to it a week later and already starting to think about how it seemed “the great majority of the recreational or part-time U.S. online poker players have now moved on from poker entirely.”

Three years on I was stepping back even further, talking about some of my various trips abroad where I’d get to experience vicariously other countries’ “online poker cultures” and be reminded in a vague way of the one I used to experience on a daily basis.

Today, four years later, I saw a few fleeting references to Black Friday in my Twitter timeline -- when I fleetingly checked it, that is, as I’ve now adopted a policy not to keep the sucker open all day as I used to do. But I didn’t see too much deep thought about it.

We’ve all more or less moved on -- some literally, most of us figuratively. Seems like much, much more than four years ago now, the memory of it (and what came before) having nearly faded to black.