Adanthar wrote a great piece recently about the potential effect of the Absolute Poker scandal on the Poker Player Alliance’s efforts to legitimize online poker in the US. He cites the lack of a market response to the revelations of cheating as evidence that informal regulation by the community of high stakes players is insufficient and concludes that,
“there is nothing that could be worse for us at this point than a widely held perception that online poker really *is* rigged that we cannot instantly refute in a single sentence. That has got to immediately change. In the short term, the change may have to come from the sites themselves or from their licensing agencies – certainly, the KGC’s new…umm, existence…is a start, as is the theoretical new culture of transparency at AP – but in the long run, we must both accept and embrace governmental oversight.” [emphasis is his]
In the event of another scandal, he argues, the best legislative outcome we could hope for would be a bill that legalized online play but explicitly excluded these unaccountable, overseas operations. For preservation of access to existing sites, he recommends three things:
“1)The sites have got to maintain their newly improved security procedures and remain on their best behavior.
2)The PPA must be more proactive with respect to these issues than it is now, and must seek to develop some sort of platform for answering the question “What form of regulation should Congress impose?” Simply seeking a “legalize and forget” bill without wondering about what happens if and when someone asks for conditions – and a large number of Congressmen surely will – is not good enough.
3)Either the PPA or the sites themselves (same thing, really) must come up with some sort of PR strategy for handling these types of issues in a coordinated fashion.”
I couldn’t agree more, and I hope that he is able to participate in this process, as he suggests he might.