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Are there any legal or quasi-legal ways to play online poker in the US, currently?


Keep forgetting about Black Friday. You can buy a PokerStars account from people in Bolivia/Germany/etc. and use a VPN to connect. I know a few people doing this. There's a new online site in Nevada right now, only for Nevada residents, but I hear it's a pretty big failure. New Jersey is very close to releasing it's own online poker site as well.

On top of that I think most US players play on iPoker skins (black chip poker, cake poker, etc.) which allow US players.

But yeah, all of them (apart from the Nevada/New Jersey sites) are technically illegal down there. Most professionals who didn't quit poker altogether and didn't transition to live either moved to Canada or some third world country with no taxes and cheap living to grind.


I think "technically illegal" should be defined here.

I played professionally a few years back, so this was my understanding of the law then, and I haven't heard of any changes:

It's perfectly legal, as a player, to play. Laws have been created that prevent banks from transferring money to and from poker sites.

When Black Friday happened, it was primarily because poker sites were committing fraud to work with banks to process payments.

There are still sites operating, however they take very, very long to process payments, limit cashouts to a point where professional play is not possible, and can suffer the same fate as the big three sites did on Black Friday.


Not any good ones, no.

All of my professional-playing friends quit or moved out of country after Black Friday.

You can bypass location restrictions with VPN, but you also need a foreign bank account and can be caught and have your funds seized.


Maybe BitCoin poker rooms?


I believe it is illegal in US. They do exist in UK. Not sure on their legality there.




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