The UIGEA was officially implemented in the United States at the start of June but after one month it seems like the change had no real effect in the online poker landscape.


John Pappas, director of the Poker Players' Alliance says that PPA have received very little complaints in the recent month from players saying they have had difficulties in funding their online poker accounts. This is mostly due to the fact that the big changes in the online poker environment already took place almost 4 years ago when the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) was passed in the US Congress. It was then that many sites, headed by the market leader at the time, PartyPoker, decided to withdraw from the US altogether, and those who remained had to find alternative payment systems that were not affected by the new law.

This also had the unfortunate effect of banishing a lot of the US school of fish from the online games, as the players who wanted to keep on playing had to put in some extra effort to fund their online accounts and a relatively larger proportion of them were the good players.

"We’re kind of the front line,” John Pappas is quoted on Compatible Poker. "If our members have problems, they email us, and we haven’t really seen an uptick of complaints from our members." The PPA have more than one million members.

The biggest online poker rooms still serving US customers are PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Cereus and the Cake Poker Network.

Source: Compatible Poker.