Now that the feds shut down PokerStars.com (the major sponsor of US Chess League) and other major online poker sites, how will it effect US Chess League?
Three largest online poker sites indicted and shut down by FBI
April 15, 2011
The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to a thriving industry.
Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and a number of their affiliates were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the defendants were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others.
Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By Friday afternoon Full Tilt Poker’s site displayed a message explaining that “this domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.”
The online gambling industry has taken off over the last decade, drawing an estimated 15 million Americans to bet online.
In 2006 Congress passed a law curtailing online gambling. Most of the leading sites found ways to work around the law, but prosecutors allege that in doing so they broke the law.
“These defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.
Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com
Why would chess be associated with an illegal company which breaks U.S. laws? Who came up with this brilliant idea?
Hopefully now the world will have time to understand just how criminal the US govnerment, FBI, and DOJ truly are. They have yet to physically verify a single piece of plane debris from 9-11. NOT ONE single piece of debris has been verified from 9-11. The FBI in collusion with the US military staged 9-11.
With this corporate takeover by the order of banks and the US government will hopefully wake people up to the criminal staged and ordered acts that they have committed before. The war on terror is a staged fraud just like the WMD’s in Iraq.
So why do we prosecute one set of gamblers and give huge bailouts to another set? (I’ve been playing too much chess, where the rules are the same for everybody.)
America’s puritan anti-gambling laws are a joke.
If you check the poker news it says the sites are back up at http://www.fulltilpoker.co.uk and http://www.pokerstars.eu, it seems everything is back to normal except US players can’t deposit for now. I really hope they find another payment processor soon.
The US players aren’t now allowed to play for cash at those sites. The US players with existing cash balances are likely going to lose their money to the US government as part of the criminal settlement.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than a money search by a government on the brink of a fiscal abyss. There will be more money hunts- count on it.
How much of the PokerStars money does Greg Shahade keep for himself and how much does he pay all the other GMs? Is there any accounting for this?
“Why would chess be associated with an illegal company which breaks U.S. laws? Who came up with this brilliant idea?”
Because poker is about crooks trying to make lots of money.
Chess is about crooks trying to make very little money.
It is a matter of scale.