[TheEngineer]

I'll address America. When UIGEA "passed" (i.e., was sneaked through the Senate, albeit after it sailed through the House), many poker sites abandoned America. The [censored] politicians who advocated it vowed to introduce legislation this year finish what UGIEA started. 2+2 LLC's team of lawyers embarked on month's long project to develop a statement in response. Dark days indeed. Fortunately, a few sites stayed here, determined to prove that the Wire Act does not apply to poker.

We voted Rep. Leach out of office. His party lost power of Congress at the same time, giving us the starting point of a chance. Still, these were dark days. However, even when victory looked impossible, many poker players decided to fight back on general principle.

Since then, things have improved. We have three bills in Congress and a WTO victory. We've had two hearings in Congress, the second of which FINALLY put word out our belief that the Wire Act does not apply to poker. While the DoJ claims it does, we made a good case, and we have an appeals court ruling backing us. ePassporte operates from CA with impunity, and Doyle's Room decided to come back to the U.S. market. Harrah's and MGM recently announced their belief that online poker will be explicitly legal in the U.S. within two years. And, the PPA matured a lot under more effective leadership.

From here, our main challenge right now is to keep from getting snared by UIGEA via overblocking, as banks have no reason to challenge the DoJ's interpretation of the Wire Act. Fortunately, we have allies posting challenges to the draft UIGEA regs. Hopefully 2+2 LLC's crack legal team is crafting their comment right now. Other concerns are new legislation (our strong offensive has been a great defense for us), a judicial upholding of (or a refusal to hear a challenge to) the DoJ's position that the Wire Act applies to Internet poker, or a DoJ offensive on Internet poker.

I have no way of predicting our likelihood of success, but I can tell you it's much higher than it was six months ago, for sure. I've always said we're underdogs in our struggle, but I'm starting to believe we're now better than 50-50. I do know that if can increase our chances by fighting back. We're certainly stronger than other Internet gaming, mainly because they didn't fight back as effectively as we did. So, I encourage everyone to keep fighting back.

Americans should keep on their congressmen. Europeans can write to EU trade officials to demand that they settle their WTO claims against the U.S. with Inernet gaming concessions, rather than with non-gaming service concessions. If we all do our part, I think we have a really good shot at this. If we let up even a little, I think we'll fail. So, let's all do our part! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]