Black Friday Summary

Such a long time has passed since my last blog update, and a lot has happened in the poker world since then. I won't go into immense detail about it here as the intricacies are covered in much greater depth elsewhere (google is your friend) but all I will say is that 'Black Friday' shook poker to its core. The Indictment of three big sites (Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and UltimateBet/Absolute Poker) by the Department of Justice in the US for illegal payment processing to US citizens has effectively plunged the US online poker world into darkness with no online access for anyone, at least until poker is fully regulated in the US which may take years. As a result of this all the lucrative sponsored US players are now no longer sponsored, poker advertising in the US is dead and of course, there are far less people in the 'poker economy' than before.

The fates of the two main sites (lets ignore UB for now) couldn't be more different either. Following permission from the DOJ, Pokerstars promptly paid US players their funds back, and converted loyalty points earned into cash. Pokerstars had also long been channelling a lot of time and effort into regional poker around the world and had licences for country-specific sites in places like france and italy. Overall, despite the US player pool vanishing overnight, the total traffic at the site is down only 30% which is amazing. It's still an astonishingly busy site and you can still play huge field MTT tournaments (although the below may have something to do with that)...

Full Tilt on the other hand, managed to completely demonise themselves. Even though they had permission to return player balances, it soon became apparent that the site were unable to do this as they had not segregated the player balance funds from their regular operating costs. After this transpired, the site had their channel-island licence revoked and it effectively shut the site down for good, or at least until a buyer comes along who can also return the millions of dollars to players. The majority of FTP pro's also decided not to play in the world series, which meant some notable absences, including the number one poster boy Phil Ivey.

Clearly, online poker will end up being regulated in the US and the players - and sponsorships - will return. It may even have a bigger boom as the 'legality' of the sites may tempt more recreational players out. But when that happens is anyones guess.

The original 'biggest site' Party Poker may end up being the big winner out of all this if it can strike a deal with one of the big Vegas casino groups to have their software ready to roll. Who knows.

But for now we are operating in a rather odd, post Black-Friday world where traditional poker celebrity somehow seems less valid before and quite possibly a new generation of top-players will emerge. Pokerstars focus on Germany may well have had some reason why we had the first German world champion this year at the WSOP in Pius Heinz and by the time of regulation, there may well be a more even split between the big US names and the big Euro names. Time will tell.