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.

My friend noticed that I didn’t post anything for the entire month of October.  Well, it was a combination of things, but mostly it was jury duty.  Since I’m used to waking up late, having to do jury duty put me on a weird schedule that made me tired all the time.  I just didn’t feel like writing anything.

Over the years, I’ve been on a jury 5 times, so this wasn’t anything new for me.  The case I was on was a commercial burglary, so it was fairly straight forward. Or so I thought.

When we took our first poll, it was 7 to 5, so I knew we were in for some work.  After having the testimony re-read to us by the court reporter, and spending a couple of hours re-drawing the map of the area on the white board, the count was 9 to 3.  In fact, at one point, the number went back to 8 to 4.

After 4 days of deliberation, the 12 of us finally came to a verdict on the case, at least on one of the 2 counts.  I guess one man’s simple case is another man’s enigma.

What does all this have to do with anything?  Actually, this was the first time that I was picked for a panel on jury duty since I started playing poker.  I didn’t realize it but playing poker and looking for tells, and watching the players have made me a better juror.  In the past, I struggled to see who was lying, and who I should trust.  This time around, it seemed a lot easier to me because of my poker training.

This made me think that maybe the lawyers should play some poker.  As a matter of fact, Mark Seif, a professional poker player, is (or was) a lawyer.  It might even be a good idea to ask potential jurors if they play poker.

Another talent that seems to work well with poker is being a magician.  I used to do some magic tricks starting from about Junior High to about 9th grade when I lost interest when I found computers.  Of course, Antonio Esfandiari was a magician, and that’s his poker nickname as well.

Therefore, a lawyer that’s also a magician probably would be one of the best poker players possible.

Everybody and his brother’s casino has some type of players’ card or VIP card.  When each casino starts having yet another card for their computerized table, this is really going to be rediculous.  It’s already got my wallet stuffed to it’s maximum capacity.

Too bad the casinos can’t get together and have one standard card for all casinos.  But that would be asking too much.  The one possible hope would be for some outside company, like one of the computerized table manufacturers, to come out with some card that all the casinos would use.  Unfortunately, I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime.

So what does carrying all these cards really do for us.  Well, let’s see.

The Bicycle Club
If you play in the medium to large no limit tables, you already get free food.  They used to pay you back cash if you played a lot but I don’t know if they still do that.  They have tournaments for people with accumulated hours on their card.  I guess that’s something.

Commerce
Their card is just for tournament entries and nothing else.  It’s to make their life easier for registration purposes only.  No real benefit for the players, except maybe quicker registration.

Crystal Casino
I have no idea what the card does for me.  I emailed them but didn’t get an answer back.  Nice customer service.

Hawaiian Gardens
Again, I have no idea what the card does for me.  I emailed these guys too and didn’t get anything back either.

Hollywood Park Casino
You can earn comp credit for every hour played, and you’ll earn credits good for casino food, redemption center, and gift shop merchandise, or even cash. You’ll also be eligible for special tournaments, parties and promotions open only to Players’ Club Members.  All this according to their website.

Hustler Casino
As you accumulate points, they can be redeemed for food, items at their casino store, or even items at their Hustler store in Hollywood.  2 years ago, I used this to buy Hustler store gift coupons for Christmas.

Normandie Casino
I’ve been playing here on Saturday and they tell me that you can accumulate points for food or items at the gift store.  However, on the $500 table, all food is free so I’ve not used the “Lucky Koi” card.

Hustler Casino now has one of those computerized poker tables called “Fastdeal Poker.”

For now, it’s a $25 (or $60 or $100) Sit-N-Go table with 10 players.  Here’s how it works.  First, you need to get one of these Fastdeal cards (see photo) by going to a kiosk next to the lower limit waiting list.

It’s a touch screen kiosk where you enter your name (or any name), your birthdate and a PIN, then put cash into the machine to load up your card.  The kiosk will then print out your name on the card and it pops out of the machine.

Now, you take the card to the computerized table and sit down at one of the 10 seats.  You then swipe your card into the machine and it reads your info and your name comes up on the main large screen at that seat position.  I wanted to take a picture of the table but they wouldn’t let me.

At first, I tried touching the screen with my fingers and it did not work properly.  One of the other players told me to use my card instead and that worked better.  Funny how the kiosk touch screen worked fine with my fingers but not this one at the table.  They should have asked Apple to let them use the iPhone touch screen.

You are given 1,000 chips and I think the blinds started at 25-25, but it may have been 25-50.  The blinds go up every 8 minutes and because most of the players are still trying to figure out how to use the machine, the blinds go up really fast.  I got lucky and doubled up right away on my flush draw.

One of my biggest complaints is the tiny dealer button is hard to find sometimes.  I don’t see why it couldn’t be bigger and even blinking or something.  At least put it closer to the center instead of against the edge.  Also, the table was so high, I could barely see the screen properly.  The next weird thing is, after 2 players are all-in, all the cards come out instantaneously and the results (who won, lost) are shown in less than a second.  Even online poker games don’t do this.

Now, I realize this is called “Fastdeal,” but come now.  Couldn’t we at least enjoy our last moments in the game with some excitement of having a flush draw on the turn?  It was so fast, I didn’t even have time to see what my opponents hand was before it told me I won.  Obviously, the people who wrote this code have never written a good game on any platform or PC.  In fact, with my background, I think I have the expertise to say that whoever designed the user interface was a borderline moron.

By the way, before we started playing, there was a glitch with one of the players screens and they had to reboot the computer.  Each screen (including the main screen in the middle of the table) showed a BIOS screen, followed by a Windows XP screen booting.  That explains why they had to reboot the darned thing.  I’m surprised we didn’t get the blue screen of death in the middle of the game.   I don’t see why they need XP just to run a multi-user game.  I think this whole thing could run on MSDOS or even straight from ROM.

One thing I noticed was that the rebooting process was being controled from off-site.  The floor-lady was talking to somebody on her cell phone and they were doing the rebooting via the Internet.  I’m sure they’re one hacker away from some rigged game coming down on them.

Anyway, once it got to heads-up, suddenly, the game went into slow mode and once we were all-in, would show the turn and river as slow as on some TV shows.  Very strange.  It was so slow, we were joking that maybe it crashed and needed to be rebooted again.  If they’re going to do it this way, why not show the win percentages like on TV?  That would be at least somewhat interesting and something that we don’t get on regular tables.

Well, I managed to win 1st, which was $126 because the one girl wasn’t able to play and the other guy got 2nd, which was $50 something.  I don’t think the whole thing even took 30 minutes.  I’m not sure.  Of course, that’s not including the 3 times of rebooting which may have been like 45 minutes.  After you win, you return to the kiosk and login to your account and follow the instructions to get a printout which you take to the cage to cash.  No ID required.

Between the reboot, bad touch screen, hard to see button, and no exciting turn and river dealing, I don’t see this version of the hardware or software taking over anything anytime soon.  The dealers at the club have nothing to worry about yet.

I know that Commerce also has live games and Sit-N-Go video tables so I’m going to check those out next.  I hope they’re better than this one.