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FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

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Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#301

Post by nomurrcy »

dia80 wrote: post #267
nika wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't attempt to argue that the Liberty Dollar wasn't a misguided enterprise. Even when the law is on your side, the fact that the government controls the courts assures that you'll never get a fair trial. You're misunderstanding the constitution and what the "right to create currency" means. There are many currencies in circulation, and there have been many state and even private currencies over the years. Even to…

I listened to a lecture by the author of "The Creature from Jekyll Island" where he made some outrageous claims about the ownership of the Fed. I was trading US Govt. bond futures at the time and we went to some pains to understand the federal reserve system and to say he erred in fact is being generous. It was full of slavering nonsense, often with anti semetic overtones. As a side point paper money is obviously ext…

What kind of outrageous claims? (Just curious)

To me what is shocking is that most people thing the Federal Reserve (which is probably the most powerful institution in the country) is part of the government and not privately owned.

I work for a very large bank and most employees here think you're crazy if you tell them the Fed is a private bank.

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#302

Post by BrandonM »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #218
jarin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure, a bunch of my mainstream friends are freaking out about it. They didn't care about the previous seizures, but once you stop people from playing Internet poker at work everyone turns into a civil rights advocate.

That's not necessarily a representative sample - it's only poker players, thus far.

That group is probably bigger than you think. There is a very large population of professional poker players, and those people make their money from a population of everyday players that are least ten times the size of the professional players. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people whose poker accounts have essentially been frozen.

TL;DR: About $100M-$1B of law-abiding citizens' money is currently in limbo because the government didn't consider the collateral damage of its attack on the big 3 poker sites (for all intents and purposes, UB and AP are the same site).

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#303

Post by dgordon »

fjh wrote: post #256
smokeyj wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the Monopoly instructions read "if any questions arise, ask the Banker, his word is final", I would not play that game.

That's more or less what the rules for any Pen&Paper RPG and lots of different sports (e.g. soccer) say.

Yep, as anyone who watched the World Cup learned: see the phantom foul (no one even knows who it was allegedly on) that took away the US victory over Slovenia, or the referee denying a game-tying goal by England against Germany that the whole stadium got to see on replay, to which FIFA's response was to ban replay from the rest of the World Cup.

It's not good in sports and it's far worse in government.

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#304

Post by BrandonM »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #222
eof wrote: post #18

Wow this is huge. I used to play online poker for a living, I had a decent chunk of cash locked up for almost a year when they came down on online poker previously (UIGEA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFE_Port_Act#Internet_gambling... It's worth noting that these are NOT American companies. It doesn't look like anyone (players) has had their assests seized; but this is bad news for a lot of people. It also appears p…

> I had a decent chunk of cash locked up for almost a year This isn't a judgement, but a real attempt to understand: why would you lock up a significant amount of money someplace like that?

Professional poker players can only safely risk 5% or less of their bankroll at any one time (due to luck factors -- there are many ups and downs), players typically keep their bankroll as large as possible so that they can play as high-stakes as possible. The higher your stakes, the higher your hourly rate.

Where do you keep your cash? If your business deals in dollars and cents, you probably keep it in a bank account. Your clients pay you, making its way into your account, and you pay bills out of that account.

Poker players do all their business with their poker accounts. Rakeback sites deposit directly into the accounts, player transfers are often used to facilitate real-world transactions between friends, and things like concierge service can even be provided by the poker sites themselves.

For a poker player, their online accounts are both their cash and their capital. There's really no way around having a large amount of money tied up on these sites if you're a high stakes player.

And it's not irrational. These sites make so much money in rake every day that it would never make sense for them to run off with everyone's money. At least not until the government steps in, seizes their cash, and threatens their business model when it's not even clear that the act of hosting poker games is against the law.

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#305

Post by pavel_lishin »

eof wrote: post #269
pavel_lishin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had a decent chunk of cash locked up for almost a year This isn't a judgement, but a real attempt to understand: why would you lock up a significant amount of money someplace like that?

Well in the pre-uigea days Neteller was the company winning th transfer market.. very similar to paypal except you could use them for poker sites. When the UIGEA passed, neteller had all it's assests frozen. This is common practice though.. poker players will have a huge chunk of their networth on poker sites. Keeping money online just made sense, that's where you would use it to make more money. So I didn't get it l…

> neteller had all it's assests frozen.

... making it just as vulnerable as virtually anything, right? So...

And until they exchange it, it's in a currency that's only recognized by a single "bank" - the Poker site - so in my mind (and this might just be me being insane) it's not really real.

If I can't buy a sandwich or a beer with it, it doesn't feel like real cash.

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#306

Post by BrandonM »

palewery wrote: post #264
heyitsnick wrote: post #260

I'm happy to see this featured so highly in hacker news. As a professional poker player, the biggest concern right now are players balances. I know players with 250k+ bankrolls that are extremely concerned about the status of their money online. Right now it's entirely unclear the relative size of the seizures. If anyone has any questions from someone in the midst of this, fire way. I'll be up all night.

Can you explain why someone would leave that much money in there? Are there tables that you can bring 250k to? Do these sites pay interest? How do you trust these sites? A casino in Las Vegas will get huge fines if one of the employees rips off players. How do you know some internal IT guy isn't cheating you?

I made a longer post below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452958) that explains it all a bit better, but for poker players, their balances on poker sites serve both as checking accounts (in many ways) and as their capital. That's like asking why a corporation's value is tied up in its stock. A poker player's account balance is his livelihood.

You can sit at some tables with $100K. It's very easy to 4-table. Moreover, it's very easy to have a 10-buy-in swing. This means that at a bare minimum, a legitimate player has at least 15 buy-ins on any given site, and he damned well better have another 15-25 somewhere else (cash, other sites, etc.) if he doesn't want to risk blowing his entire bankroll (going "busto").

The players with these kinds of balances are part of a very tight-knit community that is largely centered around 2+2. FullTilt and PokerStars both have representatives that post there. It is basically to the poker world what Hacker News is to the tech world. If even one player's money was seized for an undisclosed reason, the major sites (which make money hand-over-fist daily from rake) would lose a lot of faith, and their entire business model centers on their customers' good faith.

There were a few people cheating before on UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker. Thanks to the aforementioned community reconciling various players' hand databases (each hand can be logged), they were caught and both of those sites lost a ton of business.

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#307

Post by bostonscott »

This is another case of government manufacturing criminals.

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers."

- Ayn Rand

Re: FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

#308

Post by btilly »

rauljara wrote: post #113
smokeyj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Constitutional law is so much more complicated than, "this is what the document says". If you can't read the document and deduce it's meaning, why use this document? Is this an emperors clothe type of thing?

If you actually read the document, you would see that the document includes provisions for a court system under the very correct assumption that some people would read the document and come to different conclusions about just what the document means. Ever played a board game and had people disagreed on what the rules said. If you play games of any complexity, it happens all the time. Life is considerably more difficu…

If you actually read the document, you would see that the document includes provisions for a court system under the very correct assumption that some people would read the document and come to different conclusions about just what the document means.

The document does have a court system, but if you read it closely you'll realize that nowhere in it does it say that the courts have the ability to rule on the constitutionality of anyone else's actions, nor does it say what the courts can do if the constitution is violated. That was a power that the courts themselves decided that they had. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison for details.

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