Good question and one that a lot of people in the poker world are keeping a very close eye on.  Online sites, websites, players, affiliates, skins, advertising companies, publishers, television networks, poker is becoming so main stream that the list of potential casualties is endless.

Again I will point out from the start that I have no legal qualification and readers shouldn’t take any decisions in response to this without seeking proper legal advice.  Most of what I have written below is an amalgamation of thoughts from respected individuals in the poker world.  Even amongst these people, there is still a reasonable amount of difference of opinion as to how things will change moving forwards.

For those that don’t know, a piece of US legislation was recently passed (at the time of writing was still awaiting presidential signature) called The Safe Port Act, which was seen as a no-brainer to pass as it addressed security issues.  However, some dirty rotten scoundrel stapled the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 to the back of it, which was very underhand and is the bit that the poker world is interested in.  In short, the law seems to aim to enforce existing Internet gambling law by making it very hard for financial institutions to process money from or to online gambling sites.  Potentially this could make it very difficult for resident Americans to play poker online.  Enough so that the stock market reacted very badly to the news and share prices fell by as much as half in some cases.  The reactions probably have been exaggerated and people now fear the absolute worst and that it is all coming to an end.

As a UK resident, I think there are two main ways that this could be bad news for you.  Firstly, the recreational player in the US may decide that playing online is too much trouble (even though they could probably continue to use an e-wallet company such as Neteller to fund gaming accounts) and stop playing.  Following on from that, it could be that the only players that take the time and trouble to continue playing are winning players, which hopefully you would rather not play with if you can help it.  So, the standard goes up and those break-even players now become losing players, small winners are now break even, etc.

Secondly, potentially there could be less of a marketing drive in the US to attract new players, which again would affect the mix of weak players in an average game and affect the liquidity of players on a site during quiet times of the day, although some sites will now try harder to focus on European players and there may be tournaments at better times and such as a result.

Some of the gaming sites have already reacted to this news and decided to act quickly to spell out their intent.  Some are continuing as usual and we will have to see where that leads.  Others have taken a very hard decision to suspend US resident accounts as soon as the act becomes law, due later this week.  Already, there seems to be movement of players around the online poker community, you may find that your regular game now has a few more loose (or tight) players than you are used to and you will have to react to a slightly different game composition.

Reading the best (and legally qualified) opinions I can find on the matter, the view seems to be that in fact very little will happen, the market will react to the shock and settle down fairly quickly and things will return to normal.  Only time (and a couple of trials!) will tell.