After the terrible events of Black Friday when the online poker world was rocked, the US federal government shocked the poker community by seizing the domain names of the most popular online poker rooms in the US. This incident affected the US players and the US online poker market.
This crackdown and its impact on the online poker world encouraged advocates of online poker legalization and gambling companies to strengthen their efforts to legalize and regulate the US online poker industry at the federal level.
A number of gambling companies became more than eager to launch legal online poker rooms in the US. One of these sites is SkillBet.com, which says that it has the license to operate in 28 US states.
SkillBet has an interesting way of running Texas Hold’em games. For instance, if two live players play against five bots, the live player winning the larger amount of money will win the difference in the amount he/she won and the amount won by the other player, provided the bots they were playing against, their starting hands, and the community cards on the table are all the same. If live player A won $20 and live player B won $10, live player A would receive $10.
SkillBet.com states that Marc Zwillinger, a gaming advocate based in Harvard, supports its claim that online poker is legal in over 24 US states. Chuck Humphrey, a lawyer based in Denver, also agrees. In fact, Humphrey had supported the legality claims made by DuplicatePoker.com, which now no longer exists.
Humphrey, who operates gambling-law-us.com, a highly reputable online resource on gambling laws, said: “It can be done if it’s done right. In my judgment, it’s not poker … it is a game of skill.”
According to gambling laws in most US states, factors such as buy-in, chance, and prize are taken into consideration to determine whether a game is illegal or not. Humphrey stated that SkillBet has done away with the element of luck. SkillBet.com says that since both live poker players are given the same hands, the same community cards, and the same bots, the factors that determine the winner are only the decisions they make.
It remains to be seen whether US poker players will accept SkillBet.com. It may be recalled that DuplicatePoker.com simply did not become popular in the US and finally had to be shut down.
