The U.S. Attorney of Manhattan has called Full Tilt Poker a massive Ponze scheme against it’s own players. Civil money laundering complaints were filed against Full Tilt and it’s board of directors, alleging that the site improperly used funds of online poker players to pay members of its board of directors, including famous poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson, $440 million since April 2007.

This is yet another bad blow to on-line poker, after the bad beat it got back in April from the DOJ. Back in June, there was a lot of talk about Full Tilt when professional poker player Phil Ivey sued Full Tilt and refused to play in the 2011 WSOP until Full Tilt paid all of the players.

At this point, it’s not clear if players can get their money out of Full Tilt but according to the charges, Full Tilt does not have enough money to pay all of it’s players.

At this point, it’s clear that there needs to be governmental regulations to control online poker. It would be safer for players, and with taxes, more money for the government. It would be a no-brainer win-win situation. But of course, this is the government we are talking about so it may take a few decades.

As of April 15, 2011, when you go to pokerstars.com, this is what you will see.

It’s a lot like what happened to the pirate websites recently where the Department of Justice took over the domain name and put their own message up on their servers.

The FBI has indicted 11 defendants who are the founders or owners of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, and seized over 70 bank accounts.

Pokerstars has moved their website to pokerstars.eu and for non-US players, it’s business as usual. However, US players are not allowed to play although their website states that all your deposited money is safe.

At this point, I have to believe that most players would be scared to deposit any new money and there is probably a rush to withdraw money from the sites. This obviously has to hurt the bottom line for those big poker sites.

What will this all mean for online poker? For now, it’s wait and see but it’s not good for business, except perhaps at live casinos.

Many states have had false starts for many years regarding legalizing online poker, including Florida, Hawaii, and New Jersey to name a few.  Perhaps because of all the red ink and many government bank accounts being empty, D.C. has been given the green light in the 2011 budget to allow online poker to their 600k residents.

Interestingly, the word “poker” is not mentioned in the bill. However, it allows “both games of skill and games of chance,” and to offer games on the Internet. It’s obvious that this would include online poker. The game would most likely be provided by Intralot Interactive, which has an existing relationship with the D.C. Lottery.

Officials expect that the online poker site will not be ready until the end of 2011 and proceeds to not come until 2012. Things move slowly in government.

It’s not clear if Intralot will have the experience needed to create a good online poker environment but that may become mute if this causes a domino effect and forces states to legalize online poker.

It will still take years for things to move forward but this is definitely the first step to legalizing online poker in the United States.

According to an article on MSNBC.com, players on Ultimatebet.com have been accused of cheating, by viewing the hole cards, and winning more than their normal share of pots.

Absolutepoker.com and Ultimatebet.com are owned by the same company and there was a case of cheating reported last year on Absolutepoker.com.  In this strange case, there’s a claim of  $75 Million in losses, and another company which sold software to Ultimate, Excapsa Software Inc. of Toronto, is being liquidated in an attempt to collect the claim.

How the money from the liquidation will be distributed is another entirely different question.  Apparently, there’s more than one cheater involved in this scheme so it would be difficult to trace back to all the hands and pots that all these people were involved in.

What a big mess this is.  And this is yet another reason for people to claim that there’s something wrong going on with online poker.  Apparently, at least in this case, they are right.

In my opinion, this is exactly why online poker should be regulated like it is in England, instead of pretending like nobody uses it in U.S.  Of course, regulation doesn’t seem to work very well when the regulators are in bed (literally) with the people they are regulating, but at least there would be something to point our fingers at.

Pokerstars.com is giving away free entries to the WSOP 2008 main event. What’s the catch? Well, you have to come in the top 50 out of 5,000 in your first level tournament. The blinds go up every 5 minutes. Once you do that, then you get to enter the next free tournament, where you must come in the top 2 to win your entry. Also, you can only enter once a week.

If you’re interested in this, login to your pokerstars account, click on “Events,” then “WSOP,” then click on one of the “WSOP $1M Giveaway: Round 1 Freeroll.”

If you don’t mind paying, there are other ways you can get in. There’s a $33 entry tournament where they give away at least 1 WSOP entry. The closest I got was heads-up where I was all-in with pocket Queens against AK <spade> . The flop brought two <spade> with low cards, and you can guess the rest. Damn! So close.

So far, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it to the WSOP this year.