As PokerStars gets closer to re-entering the United States, it wants to keep its reputation as squeaky clean as possible. The world’s largest online poker room already had to go through a lot and fork over tons of money just to get back into MAYBE the neutral graces of the U.S. government. It doesn’t need to piss anybody off when a New Jersey online gaming license seems likely. Plus, now that it is owned by Amaya Gaming, it is under even more scrutiny as part of a publicly traded company.
That means PokerStars cannot allow Americans to play on its site.
Now you might be thinking, “But PokerStars doesn’t allow Americans to play on its site!” You would be right. But that does not mean that poker players in the United States aren’t able to do so. It is not an extremely prevalent thing, to be sure, but where there’s a will, there’s a way and there are plenty of people who have worked around PokerStars’ geographic restrictions so that they can continue making money on the poker room with the most traffic on the web.
PokerStars is not stupid. The company knows this happens. They have caught loads of people since Black Friday in 2011, booting them from the site. But now, PokerStars says, things are going to get serious. As the result of a recent post on Two Plus Two in which a person cried foul at Americans sneaking onto the site, PokerStars’ Head of PR Michael Josem chimed into let everyone know what’s what.
He explained:
As players may be aware, on April 19, 2011, PokerStars agreed with the US Department of Justice to not allow players located in the United States to play online poker for real money. As part of that agreement, the DOJ appointed a Monitor to ensure that we did this. As a result of this agreement, PokerStars introduced a whole range of complementary measures to prevent players from accessing our services from the United States – and to take action against players who tried to circumvent those restrictions.
He went on, saying that though the Department of Justice is over and done with, PokerStars remains vigilant and has even expanded upon its policies. Continuing, Josem said:
In addition, earlier this year, we increased the severity of our punishments because it no longer credible for the vast majority of players to claim that they didn’t know that they can’t play from the US. Our previous policy was, by default, to only confiscate net winnings (except when we were convinced the player was malicious, in which case we would confiscate their whole balance). Over recent months, by default, we have been confiscating the whole balance (except when we are convinced that the player was non-malicious and had no knowledge of this restrictions, in which case we only confiscate net winnings). We made this decision earlier this year, and it this decision has no relationship to any other recent announcements.
Though Josem said that none of this has anything to do with “recent announcements,” it would be surprising if PokerStars isn’t working extra hard right now, with U.S. licensing momentum, to be sure Americans aren’t able to access the poker room.
