International Gaming Laws for US Residents

Online Poker has made the game immediately available to individuals from every walk of life and can be played in every corner of the world.

However, some sites are unable to take US residents on board as members because of the gambling laws in the US. Before seeing how this affects poker in general, let’s have a look at how gambling laws work in the United States and try to understand the implications they have on both US residents and the game of poker itself.

Gaming and gambling have enjoyed a massive boost in the US, particularly following the internet explosion that has taken place in recent years. Throughout the past decade or so, the overwhelming majority of US States have expanded the aspect of legalised gaming to include lotteries and regulated casino games. Native land-based casino operations have become much more common and that has led to the gaming laws being frequently modernised to comply with the current boom.

The terms ‘Gamble’ and ‘Gambling’ have come to generalise the act that may fall foul of the applicable criminal laws of a particular state. ‘Gaming’ is specifically reserved to describe an activity that has been legalised by applicable law or has been exempted from it. Hence, playing a casino-style game for profit is now referred to as ‘Gambling’ because there are no US states that have specifically authorised a website to operate that allows gamers to make a profit.

The two words in themselves are not completely exclusive. As such a ‘Gaming’ activity can become ‘Gambling’ if the applicable laws of a particular state dictate that regulations in place have been violated. In much the same way, ‘Gambling’ can be deemed as ‘Gaming’ if it is found to be exempt from criminal statute.

An example of this would be a card game in a social arena where none of the players make a profit. Such a game would merely be ‘Gaming’ as they are excluded from the reach of anti-gambling law.

Complicated, isn’t it?

The situation changed for poker players in May 2006 when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed which put restrictions on credit cards, cheques and electronic banking methods being used for the purpose of gambling by US residents.

Because the act lacks clarity, eWallet merchandisers took appropriate action themselves so as to stay on the right side of US criminal law. This saw a number of huge brands leaving the US market as a large proportion of electronic depositing methods were wiped from the face of US electronic internet payment facilities.

Thankfully for poker players in the US, the poker sites didn’t see things the same way as the electronic moneymen did, and began to trim and change their sites accordingly to preserve the single largest percentage of market share in their own domain.

This led to poker sites only accepting payment methods from sources that wouldn’t violate criminal law in the US and thus kept many of their regular US players online.

Depositing methods such as Visa and Mastercard managed to make the cut although both of these credit cards are predominantly used by poker players from the European market.

ePassport is a slightly more expensive way to transfer funds but it does manage to help US based poker players to stay online at sites that will specifically accept them.

Bank wiring is a notoriously slow method but it is, at least, an option. Using wiring sees US players making somewhat larger deposits to fund their accounts so they don’t have to go through the painstaking process as often.

Posting a cheque by mail is also slow, but provides an alternative to not playing at all.

US players have also been using relatives in the UK to provide them with pre-paid debit cards in all formats that can then be used to deposit money into poker accounts from anywhere in the world. This can be a particularly quick process since the card numbers can be transmitted by e-mail or over the phone to make fast transactions possible.

Western Union, Diners Club International and Wire Cards are also viable alternatives when looking to fund a poker account from a US base.

A complicated situation is made worse by a series of poker sites that fail to improvise to gain their share of the US market share. This leads to confusion amongst players over which sites they can, or cannot, deposit in to.

Thankfully, most poker site now make it a priority to state whether or not they are ‘US Friendly’ and the sites that make the effort are the ones that gain the deserved benefits of additional income from the rakeback and tournament add-ons that US players pour into their online homes every day.

Amongst the best sites for US players are Full Tilt Poker and Carbon Poker, who have always endeavoured to provide an attractive and importantly legal poker option for players based in the good old US of A!