[Benjamin]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Donations are voluntary and tipping the dealer is not rake. If you have a case for Colorado, please cite it.

For Colorado, membership fees are considered rake only if they are tied to the game. There are very active games at the various country clubs in Denver and they all charge dues, but not specifically for poker.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have not case to site. I lived in Colorado for 13 years. I do remember around Superbowl time the radio stations discussing rules for gambling / pools.

If you pay for a membership at a country club, its mainly for the club itself and poker is not a primary benefit. There are no legal poker club memberships in Colorado. If you charged dues for this site, its main service would need to be non gambling related. If its only service is rake free poker, I doubt it will fly in the vanilla poker world.

[/ QUOTE ]

As someone pointed out the rules will vary by state. It could be that charging a membership fee would not fly in a lot of states, or maybe all of them for all I know.

Maybe you could have a suggested voluntary donation, and you could solicit voluntary donations with every won pot.

You still hold back finance charges from the rakeback, or from the 'unlimited bonus' in marketing speak. You never receive it, so that should be no problem.

Building a foundation of regular contributers, some of them substantial, would be key.

Yes, there would be free-loaders, but I do think a lot of money could be raised for this vision if you could put together the right team and backing.

You would want to establish an endowment so that down the road you have operating expenses coming from the interest/gain on the endowment.