US Poker Players Funds Released

PokerStars, the online poker room that lost its dot.com domain and had its founders indicted by the FBI in mid April, has started to release US players' funds that were kept in poker players accounts and held on trust by the poker room.

PokerStars was, until last month, the biggest online poker room, catering to millions of people from all over the world and attracting a strong US players' base in defiance of US Federal law.

The current Federal law that governs this issue is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) that was passed into law in 2006, under the Bush administration, and prohibits anyone from operating and online gambling business from the US, processing money transactions from and to US players, and processing payments for offshore gambling operators offering online gambling for US players.

At the time the UIGEA was passed into law many online gambling operators pulled out of the US market and stopped offering their services to US players, while others moved their business offshore and continued offering online gambling services to US players.

Last week the FBI agreed to release the seized doc.com domains of the three main poker sites; Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker, in order to allow the poker sites to return the funds of US players.

It will remain to be seen if PokerStars will recover by focusing most its efforts on new markets or whether it will continue to lobby for the abolition of the UIGEA in the hopes it will be able to regain its US market legally at a later date.