KELSEY MAYS
Staff Writer
They have names like The Golden Palace, The Grand Casino and Poker Room. There are flashing lights, jackpot displays and chintzy background jazz. The money is real and so are the players. There is no Strip outside, though. No cocktail waitresses, sunrise taxicabs or smoldering ashtrays. Unless you smoke in front of your computer, that is.
These places can’t be found in Vegas or Reno, but rather in some tiny corner of Dot Com Country. Online gambling venues have sprung up aggressively across the Internet since 1995, spawning a wildly profitable underground industry that legislators have yet to get their arms around.
According to CBS MarketWatch, the online gambling industry is valued at $9 billion a year and is growing fast. Typical games include roulette, craps, blackjack and poker — the latter raking in more than 20 percent of the total industry earnings.
Poker has exploded well beyond the average 22 percent the industry grows each year, in fact. Some 264 online “poker rooms” registered nearly 1.9 million actively gambling players in February, according to PokerPulse.com, a site that tracks such activity.
The attraction to online poker usually starts with incentives handed out online.
“I started out playing regular poker with quarters,” said one Pepperdine poker player, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Then my friend got a $50 bonus and I got a $25 bonus from a poker site, and so if no one wanted to play (regular poker), I could go play online.”
Good and bad fortune come and go.
“You can make a living on party poker,” said senior Calvin Larsen. “But it only takes four clicks to lose a thousand dollars.”
But skill is also involved.
“Playing online poker is tricky,” said another Pepperdine player, who also wishes to remain anonymous. “Since you can only read someone on how they bet, you have to play more cautious. You don’t have the luxury of being able to tell if someone is bluffing by the look they give. But you can win a lot of money, because there are a lot of people that play online poker who play really badly and throw money around.”
Online sites such as ParadisePoker.com deal some 900,000 hands of poker each day, according to MarketWatch. Players play for $1 to $2 per game — typically electronically transferred with systems similar to PayPal — and the sites usually take 3 percent to 5 percent of the winnings on each game. Coupled with much lower overhead than traditional brick-and-mortar establishments, one can easily see why online casinos are so lucrative.
Though many gamblers play online from within the United States, most sites are based offshore to avoid complications that stem from ambiguous U.S. legal positions. Individual states differ, but the overall federal position remains contentious at best: according to the Associated Press, federal officials point to the 1961 Wire Act, which prohibits using phone lines to place bets. In November 2002, however, a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans concluded that the act primarily targeted sports wagers and did not apply to online gambling.
03-31-2005