Re: Strange WPT Blurring
Sen. John Kyl of Arizona has been pushing anti-internet-gambling legislation for years. It always seems to run into some sort of tangle but it definitely has its backers.
On the other side...North Dakota's state legislature was trying to push forward a bill that would make them the first state to legalize internet-gambling...
thus supposedly allowing online-gambling companies to set up their servers there and also allowing ND to pull in a ton of tax money.
Also - the reason the dot-net are used now is because of the big stink the dept of justice created when they came down hard on the Discovery Networks (including Travel Channel which airs WPT) over their airing of real-money ads.
The DOJ also pressured Google and Yahoo to ban all online-gambling ads which they have been doing since March, 2004 (they will show up in a search...but there are no banner ads or 'yahoo recommends' or whatever for party-poker or pacific, etc etc on google or yahoo).
It is also increasingly difficult to deposit directly to a site via one's credit-card thanks to pressure from the american govt.
Sunnary - there's more going on than you might be aware of.
The good news is that more and more americans are accepting it through stories such as Chris Moneymaker's and through the popularity of poker and gambling in general.
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