Please check out this video from the 5:55 mark on to find out Daniel’s feelings on the Full Tilt Poker scandal:

Respect to Negreanu for having the integrity for calling this situation like it is.

Email: chris@internetpokercoach.com

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However, Macquarie Securities gaming analyst Chad Beynon said in a research report that Nevada stands to benefit from the inaction because it may be the only state that allows Americans to gamble online this year.

Earlier this week, Nevada gaming regulators finalized the state’s minimum internal control standards for interactive gaming, which could become effective in a month.

“We think the standards were written in a way that will allow for small adjustments as the process moves forward,” Beynon told investors. “At this point, no firm date has been set, but 13 companies have now submitted for an operating license.”

On Thursday, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., ended speculation that online poker legislation would be attached to a bill that renewed the payroll tax cut through the end of the year. Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, did not give a Internet poker legalization was omitted from the bill.

The payroll tax cut was approved Friday by Congress and sent to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Beynon said the major gaming operators and suppliers would continue to push for federal legalization of Internet poker because they believe Washington D.C., is better equipped than individual states to regulate online gambling.

He thought gaming companies looking to break into the online wagering field in the U.S. would look in two directions; Nevada, which has the laws in place, and social gaming on various “play for fun” sites.

“Nevada’s gaming control board continues to methodically roll out legalized intrastate gaming and we believe their regulatory board has a great handle on what’s to come,” Beynon said.

Also, he expects New Jersey, Iowa and California to adopt online gaming legislation this year. He expects other states and “potentially the federal government” to use Nevada’s Internet gaming regulations as a template for further legalization.

Three social media gaming site’s — Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, Slotomania, which operated by Playtika through an agreement with Caesars Entertainment Corp., and Double Down Casino on Facebook, which is being acquired by International Game Technology — draw more than 1 million daily users each, Beynon said.

The Double Down website has also been under construction at times because of what Beynon said are additional changes IGT is making.

“Currently, multiplayer blackjack and roulette, slot machines and video poker are available, but we expect additional slot games as well as community poker games to be added in the near term,” Beynon said.

Washington, D.C., insiders speculate Internet poker legislation could resurface during Congress’ lame duck session after November’s Presidential election. Two years ago, Reid and Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl tried to push Internet poker legalization during the lame duck session.

Whatever shape or form Internet poker legalization takes, Beynon said Nevada gaming companies will benefit.

He said Caesars Entertainment, which owns the World Series of Poker, could be well-positioned if the U.S. were to push through some type of regional pooling or federal legislation.

Beynon said land-based casino operators, such as Caesars, MGM Resorts International and Boyd Gaming Corp., have the best opportunity with state gaming legislation, depending on the laws are written. Lottery venders would also benefit because they have existing infrastructure and state contracts.

“In both cases, we believe slot vendors would be able to generate fees from both content licensing and platform design, but we note that, with a piecemeal rollout, initial revenue and profits may be minimal,” Beynon said.

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The Minimum Internal Control Standards (MICS) were finalized on Tuesday, a couple of weeks after the Technical Standards. Both help to further define the industry after the core regulatory framework was finalized in December.

Gaming Control Board Chairman Mark Lipparelli told Card Player on Thursday that the adoption of the two documents allows businesses to enter “concrete stages of product development.”

The MICS will become effective in late March. The industry stakeholders will have time to voice any concerns, Lipparelli said.

Lipparelli said that, taken as a whole, the standards were made to be “as flexible as possible,” since it’s unclear how companies will chose to conduct business.

However, for now, poker players can finally see how two important aspects of online poker’s rebirth in the United States will shake out.

Player Registration

Mark Clayton

Nevada online poker will likely begin as intrastate — where both residents and tourists can engage in play.

In order to initially register on an Internet poker site, players must provide their real name and any screen names they wish to use, a current residential address, date of birth, a physical address where they reside, a social security number if a United States resident and finally, an e-mail address.

However, an individual can begin playing poker, to a limited extent, for 30 days during the full-scale verification process. According to a regulation, a player can’t deposit more than $5,000 or withdraw money during this 30-day period.

A high degree of certainty can be established in “real time,” former Control Board Member and current 888 Poker attorney Mark Clayton told Card Player. The first level of scrutiny can be completed nearly instantaneously, Clayton said, with complete verification coming at a later date.

Technology solutions for player registration have yet to be flushed out, according to Clayton.

If the verification process fails, a player forfeits their winnings to the casino. The amount deposited will be refunded.

An operator may allow an individual to register either remotely or in person.

Deposits and Withdraws

NV gaming regulators hold hearings at the Grant Sawyer Building in Las Vegas

A poker player cannot transfer funds to anyone else. At a Control Board hearing in November, Lipparelli said that he doesn’t want online gaming sites to serve as “shadow banking.” The general concern was that player accounts could circumvent financial institutions.

Operators will try and ensure that funds deposited via one financial institution are not withdrawn to a different financial institution.

Players can deposit into and withdraw from their online account while in person at the casino. According to Nevada regulations, only existing brick-and-mortars can operate poker sites.

Funds can be transferred between an online poker account and a casino account.

Withdraws from online poker accounts will be completed within five days.

The Next Steps

Mark Lipparelli

According to Lipparelli, regulators are engaged in a “normal process” toward intrastate, and possibly interstate, online gaming.

Despite the progress, regulators have been cautious with their language and haven’t given any time frame for when the first Nevada poker site will open its doors.

However, with the MICS and Technical Standards out of the way, regulators will move toward a potential licensing phase. So far, 13 companies have applied to participate in online poker, and regulators have already started to review some of the paperwork.

With online poker applications still trickling in, regulators will also be busy with crafting language for independent testing labs, which will help inspect and certify poker sites, as well as other gaming technology in the state.

Email:chris@internetpokercoach.com

www.internetpokercoach.com

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Harry Hamburg/Associated Press

A former official sued the District of Columbia and its chief financial officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, over a lottery contracting dispute.

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Instead, the Council of the District of Columbia repealed iGaming last week over criticism that it had been approved without sufficient public comment or scrutiny.

The 10-2 vote on Feb. 7 has, for now, ended Washington’s foray into online gambling. The dustup has also opened a window into iGaming’s tumultuous creation and collapse, spurring calls for investigation and questions about the conduct of city officials.

To some, the episode has revealed not a glittering promise of gambling’s future, but an unsavory stew of political grudges and pay-to-play business dealings. It has cast a further shadow over a city government already embroiled in multiple federal investigations, one of which resulted in a council member pleading guilty last month to theft of public funds.

“If you’ve been around long enough, you look at some things and they just smell,” said Ann Loikow, a retired federal attorney and civic activist. “There’s just enough stuff that’s not right, and this is that case — on steroids.”

The District of Columbia and about a half-dozen states have been moving to adopt Internet gambling or have considered doing so. A recent Department of Justice ruling allowed such programs.

The iGaming program was approved in 2010 in an amendment added to a budget bill at 2:17 a.m. A year earlier the Council had approved a contract to operate the city’s overall lottery, which included a provision allowing new types of gambling, though the Council had rarely — if ever — discussed Internet gambling, members said.

An uproar ensued months after the approval, when opponents realized the online gambling measure had been slipped in. Marie Drissel, founder of the group Stop D.C. Gaming, said she was “absolutely stunned, to put it mildly,” when she learned that Internet gambling was going to be legal in the city.

Michael A. Brown, the Council’s chief iGaming supporter, said after the vote to repeal the program that there was “nothing wrong with the process.” He said that the plan received a public airing, albeit after it became law, and that the program’s repeal meant the city would lose tens of millions in potential revenue. (The city’s own estimate is more modest, at $13 million over four years.)

“All the Council rules were followed,” Mr. Brown said. “Nothing was done incorrectly or improperly. That’s just an excuse, and that’s just a copout.” He suggested that deep-pocketed gambling interests had killed the program.

The collapse of iGaming has also become a part of a complicated policy saga involving the overall contract to run the District of Columbia lottery. That controversy is also the subject of a lawsuit filed by the city’s former director of contracts.

The former official, Eric W. Payne, has said he was fired in 2009 for resisting efforts to meddle in the lottery contracting. He sued the city and its chief financial officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, seeking whistle-blower status and millions of dollars in damages.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gandhi declined to comment, but forwarded court filings calling the dispute “a garden variety employment case” and Mr. Payne’s complaints “cries of conspiracy.”

The turmoil began in 2007 after earlier security breaches allowed individuals to claim prizes for lottery tickets they never bought. As a result the city decided to put the contract for running the lottery out to bid, for the first time in years. But the process quickly became ensnared in procedures requiring Council approval for large contracts. Critics say the requirement, created as a check on mayoral power, encourages influence-peddling.

The winner of the new contract was a joint venture anchored by the Greek gambling giant Intralot. Its local partner, headed by a businessman named Warren C. Williams Jr., had had a series of run-ins with the city, and had antagonized Councilman Jim Graham, whose district included a nightclub Mr. Williams owned.

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Mr. Payne’s lawsuit says that Council members and Mr. Gandhi wanted a more favored partner. According to the inspector general’s report and e-mails published in The Washington Post, Mr. Graham also made a proposal: he would support the lottery contract if Mr. Williams’s company withdrew from an unrelated housing project with the area transit authority, whose board Mr. Graham served on.

In one e-mail, Mr. Williams’s lawyer, A. Scott Bolden, called the overture “very close to corruption, bid rigging and other inappropriate conduct.”

Mr. Graham declined to discuss the allegation, but acknowledged “definite reservations” about Mr. Williams’s “record with the city.”

“There is nothing in my subsequent actions to indicate that I was in any way influenced by any of these considerations,” he said. He said the lawsuit had “nothing to do with me.”

Mr. Williams, responding to Mr. Graham’s claims, wrote in an e-mail: “Individuals have a right to their opinions, but they don’t have the right to steer contracts.”

The contract languished until the Council rejected it in December 2008. The city reopened bidding, and Intralot won again, but without a partner. Byron E. Boothe Jr., Intralot’s vice president of government relations, said it became clear the Council would reject Intralot if it lacked a local minority partner.

“That’s important to D.C., and so we just understood and it’s just part of the process,” he said.

The company selected a start-up called the Veterans Services Corporation and formed a company called DC09; Veterans Services owned 51 percent, and Intralot owned the rest. Veterans Services’ president is Emmanuel Bailey, a Maryland businessman whose mother had worked for the city and was the company chairwoman.

City inspectors certifying Veterans Services’ small-business status found the company based in the family room of Mr. Bailey’s mother’s home. Inspectors found no sign of bookkeeping, payroll records or company stationery, according to their report.

Mr. Bailey said the company was still new during the inspection, and that he had been “vilified” for his role. “I would say categorically we did not in any way, shape or form seek preferential treatment, and nor did we receive it,” he said.

The intrigue has stunned even jaded observers. Dorothy Brizill, executive director of the watchdog group DCWatch, called the tangle of politics, money and contracting a “case study” of what was wrong with the district’s government.

“What you see when you stand back is not appealing whatsoever,” she said.

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The lawyer representing Group Bernard Tapie (GBT) in negotiations to purchase Full Tilt Poker has stated that the shuttered poker room is in worse shape financially than was originally believed, which has put a crimp in the acquisition process.

The poker industry is abuzz with recent allegations that a handful of well-known poker pros, including Barry Greenstein, Phil Ivey, Erick Lindgren, and Mike Matusow, owe almost $17 million to Full Tilt, which is causing delays in GBT acquiring the assets of the company and moving forward with reimbursing players with money frozen on the site.

“If the money doesn’t come in, it creates a serious obstacle to completion of the deal. This isn’t the only issue with the takeover, and the deal won’t end on any one issue, but this is a substantial item,” Behn Dayanim, the attorney trying to facilitate the deal on behalf of GBT, recently told PokerStrategy,

Some of the pros who are believed to owe money to the beleaguered poker room have spoken out about the allegations that their debts are causing the deal to be held up, including Greenstein, who was recently elected to the Poker Hall of Fame and is widely known for his substantial donations to charitable causes.

“I don’t believe my debt has any impact on the sale to the Tapie group as they have alleged,” Greenstein said on TwoPlusTwo. “I was concerned about taking money due to U.S. players and giving it to the Tapie group because it is understood that the Tapie group won’t be the one paying the U.S. players.”

Matusow, whose debt was said to be in the neighborhood of $700,000, denied that he was in arrears to Full Tilt, and tweeted to his Twitter following of 52,000, “For all my fans out there, just to let you all know, I don’t owe Full Tilt anything. Why my name is mentioned, I don’t know.”

A March 1 date for the restarting of Full Tilt was previously anticipated by Dayanim, but due to the money said to be owed to the site by the pro players, that date is now uncertain.

“It’s very difficult to predict with any certainty when the start date will be,” Dayanim told PocketFives. “There are a few issues that are substantial and material. The debt owed to Full Tilt Poker by players is a significant issue. We are hoping we’ll be able to work through it. This is a significant issue that we’re trying to address and we’ve had limited success so far.”

The saga of Full Tilt continues. Players with frozen bankrolls on the site have experienced the upswings and downswings well known to poker players. The bad news of the poker room shutting down, followed by the good news of its sale and eventual planned reimbursement of players, followed again by bad news regarding problems with the acquisition going through. One can only hope that someday the purchase and payback of players will commence. Dayanim assured players that he will strive to make the asset acquisition become a reality.

“The Tapie group is working actively to try to make this deal work,” the attorney said. “This isn’t something where we’re sitting on our hands. The group is really working hard to try to make this happen.”

When a lawyer says things like that, it gives you hope and makes you want to believe him. But when Dayanim also says, ““The company is in worse financial condition than we anticipated,” it feels like another downswing.

www.internetpokercoach.com

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The Golden Nugget casino has announced a partnership with Chiligaming to launch a free-play online poker site.

A press release about the online poker site said that it is expected to launch “within the next quarter.” The creation of the Golden Nugget online poker site and the partnership with Chiligaming is “in anticipation of the legalization of online gaming in the United States,” according to the press release:

Chiligaming’s proprietary iGaming platform, which enables it to connect to any poker platform or gaming content provider, is a central feature of its US proposition and is designed to both facilitate swift entry into the market and maximize options for the Golden Nugget as the US regulatory and vendor landscape takes shape.

The Golden Nugget is the latest Nevada gaming interest to begin positioning itself for a potential regulated online poker market in the United States. Legislation that would regulate online poker has been introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Golden Nugget chairman Tilman J. Fertitta has this to say on the partnership:

“We started an intensive process approximately nine months ago and looked at more than a dozen internet gaming companies and selected… Chiligaming because they were experienced in online gaming in Europe and demonstrated incredible passion, talent and knowledge which our team found to far exceed their competitors. We believe that online gaming is inevitable in the United States and that the Golden Nugget will be well positioned to compete when US laws allow for online gaming.”

Email: chris@internetpokercoach.com

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Dates will be determined by player interest, email me at chris@internetpokercoach.com

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We also encourage you to check out the Congress on Facebook page.  This page, created and managed by Facebook, lists every member of Congress on Facebook, and tracks their actions and interactions with others on Facebook.  Check out this fantastic year in review to see just how important Facebook  became in 2011 when it comes to interacting with our lawmakers.

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on Internet gaming on Thursday, February 9th at 2 PM ET (more info here), and PPA Board Member & Litigation Support Network Director Patrick “Skallagrim” Fleming will be testifying! I hope you will plan to watch this important hearing.

After the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed in 2006, Patrick Fleming and I were very active on the poker forums. We were not members of the PPA Board at that time. We were just poker players who were upset that our government sought to strip our rights from us. We came up through the volunteer ranks within PPA together, so I am very gratified to see my friend Patrick representing all of us on Capitol Hill this week!

In other news, as I shared with you here a couple of weeks ago, in our ongoing effort to win supporters from both sides of the aisle, PPA is attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C. This is our fourth consecutive year at CPAC. The conference will be Feb. 9th – 11th in Washington, D.C. at the Marriott Wardman Park.

PPA Executive Director John Pappas, PPA Director of Grassroots and External Affairs Drew Lesofski, PPA Board Member & 2004 WSOP Champion Greg Raymer, and I will all be there. We will have a booth in the exhibition hall. I hope everyone in the D.C. area will drop by to meet us and share your thoughts on the fight for poker!

PPA comes before poker media to take on the tough questions as often as possible. I hope you will find these interesting and informative. This past week’s interviews focused on efforts on Capitol Hill and on steps the poker community can take to advocate for our right to play.

Upcoming appearances:

• Webcast: “Poker Advocacy with Rich Muny” airs live each Monday at 8:30 PM ET on OnTilt Radio (listen live here).
• Webcast: “Short Stacked Radio’s PPA Weekly Update” airs live each Tuesday at 9:30 PM ET (listen live here).

Recent appearances:

• OnTilt Radio: Poker Advocacy with Rich Muny, with guest PPA Board Member and 2004 WSOP Champion Greg Raymer & PPA Board Member & Litigation Support Network Director Patrick “Skallagrim” Fleming (2/6/2012) (listen here)
• Short Stacked Radio: I come on at time point 1:15:33 of Part 2 (1/17/12) (listen here)
• Website: Poker Advocacy with Rich Muny, with webcast archive (here)
• Website: Short Stacked Radio PPA Weekly Update, with webcast archive (here)

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The PPA believes that momentum is behind our efforts to license and regulate online poker in the U.S. in 2012 and the fact that the U.S. Senate will be holding another hearing on Internet poker codifies our belief. We are proud to announce that Patrick Fleming, PPA’s Director of our Litigation Support Network, will testify before the committee about the impact the Department of Justice’s recent decision will have on tribal gaming.  He will also reiterate that the PPA respects the sovereignty of Indian tribes and believes that both tribes and states will benefit tremendously from federal legislation.

1. Click here and send a fully editable email to Sen. Jon Tester saying sovereignty of Indian tribes must be protected  and that both tribes and states will benefit greatly from a bill that would license and regulate online gaming in the United States.

1. Please Call Sen. Jon Tester Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-2644
   • You’re a constituent, voter and a proud poker enthusiast
   • To please attend the Senate Indian Affairs committee on February 9, 2012
   • It’s in the best interest of Indian tribes and state governments to participate in a licensed and regulated U.S. based online poker market

1. Twitter / Facebook Sen. Jon Tester and post a message saying the rights of all poker players need to be protected, please support licensing and regulation!

Proud to play,
Drew Lesofski
Director, Grassroots and External Affairs

www.internetpokercoach.com

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