ILX Poker Players Unite

No rakeback that I know of for Stars.

i can't play for like the next month, but i would be up for the ilx game again.

i can play most evenings i think with some prior notice.

e.g. weds, thurs, sunday evenings

yeah me too, if i feel like taking up this habit/time waster again. it may be harder for me now, since i have a kid.

making good progress on the bankroll playing cash games lately. seems really easy to find one or two fish to target on each table. fold everything except if i have the goods with them and then pull back the line for a double up. not really testing ones poker ability i suppose?

you generally have to use echecks now to deposit

stars is a great site but yeah they don't have rakeback (though there is a reload right now), instead they do this VPP program that is kind of like rakeback, but it only really approaches the standard 27-40% levels if you're a high volume player. you won't get anything like 33% but the upshot is that stars really is the best poker site in so many ways and has a huge pool. give and take I guess

making good progress on the bankroll playing cash games lately. seems really easy to find one or two fish to target on each table. fold everything except if i have the goods with them and then pull back the line for a double up. not really testing ones poker ability i suppose?

it was really easy to do this in the early days, but you don't really find those "all in with top pair no matter what" players anymore. you have to learn to beat the regs

hmm fulltilt are full of them or maybe they're just regs and i have gotten better? i wonder if the time of the day makes a difference too

that may be but the old style of "play really trappy" doesn't work the way it used to, even the fish know how to do things like pot control now.

time of day does make a difference...friday/saturday/sunday are the best times

I would be down for home games to lose money to ILXors. I'm available for a while some afternoons and most late evenings (CST, Texas)

Online Poker's Big Three Indicted

Can still play real-money games on Full Tilt, for the moment.

i wonder how many people are playing way above the roll right now

their roll i mean

What, just spewing because they think they'll never be able to cash out?

yeah

not that i'd know anything about that :x

what the ffffffffffffffffffffffffff

holy shit this sucks hard

i don't doubt we'll be able to get our money back but this is really bad for me

i wish san te were here to talk about this

ok i'm kind of freaking out now, apparently checks are bouncing and I was counting on this money for the down payment to the place i'm buying...this could totally screw me...BUT online poker is so big...they can't just confiscate the money can they?

there's got to be quite a few people (poker pros mainly) with millions or close to it on these sites, essentially using them as banks, right?

yeah there's a ridiculous amount of money on there

Just submitted a request to pull out the $75 I had in PokerStars. Hope it goes through.

http://www.thegreatmortgagerevolt.com/wp-content/uploads/image/run-on-the-savings-and-loan-or-bank.jpg

Full Tilt this evening.

Cashed out my $160 at Stars a couple of hours ago...requested a check instead of a transfer. Not sure why...giving them my checking acct details just feels unsafe right now.

Rumor is that the indicted sites are going to shut down worldwide within the next 48 hrs, even in countries where they operate legally.

Meet The Boy Genius Who Just Took Down The Online Poker Industry

Just got email from Stars, the cashout request is being processed. Hope the check doesn't bounce.

i haven't played in a couple years but this kinda sucks. don't really care about the money i've still got on fulltilt, i feel like the 'right' thing to do is just wait til this blows over and see how i can get it back then, rather than making a run at it and ending up with a check that won't be accepted by US banks

it doesn't let me cash out, lol

btw from what I heard the checks issued in the last few days are bouncing, so let me know if any of them come through

I may just frame mine instead of risking an NSF fee.

lol one of my online poker buddies JUST quit his job this friday in order to go full-time
can't get owned harder than that

woo i lost all of my money on fulltilt a few weeks ago and never reloaded.

Maybe a home-game scene will start to develop around here now.

how will we play our ilx game now?

maybe i'll start a server

lol last line of linked article:
"...as the Courier Mail put it, if this were still the old days, he'd buried in the Las Vegas desert right now"

like all your money

no kidding, but I doubt anything will be done about him
I mean look at Russ Hamilton, who directly stole millions from poker players, he's still alive and playing golf
still, fuck this guy, fuck the poker sites for pissing off the man with the info to bring you down

I guess maybe there will be a positive out of all this, this should lead to regulation right??

I think it will eventually. This is just the process of tearing down a bunch of houses to put up a mall.

Hey guys. Been hanging out at the hottest poker site on the Web:

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8126/screenshot20110416at956.png

acewhiskey needs to work on his bankroll management

That used to be high-rolling! Then AceWhiskey stopped playing Yahoo Games in 2004 and the rest of the world done passed him by.

I guess if checks are bouncing, I'm probably fucked on the money I had on PokerStars.

Part of me thinks I should cancel this PS cashout until the situation is a little more stable -- right now, there's a run on the bank, so to speak. After things settle down a little, Stars may put some more resources into covering cashouts so they don't freak out their remaining legal players. Y/N?

most of the advice i've heard is to just sit tight with stars and fulltilt, and try to get your money later after this blows over

kind of a long read, but Ron Paul is definitely OTM with this:

Hearing on HR 2267: the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act

July 20, 2010

Ron Paul: Thank you Mr. Chairman for holding this hearing on HR 2267, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act. While it is out of character for me, to say the least, to support a bill that regulates private transactions, I support HR 2267 because it repeals the ban on Internet gambling. The bill does not create any new federal laws; it merely establishes a process to ensure that gambling sites can comply with existing laws, and thus offer their services to adults who wish to gamble online.

The ban on Internet gambling infringes upon two freedoms that are important to many Americans: the ability to do with their money as they see fit, and the freedom from government interference with the Internet.

The proper role of the federal government is not that of a nanny, protecting citizens from any and every potential negative consequence of their actions. Although I personally believe gambling to be a dumb waste of money, American citizens should be just as free to spend their money playing online poker as they should be able to buy a used car, enter into a mortgage, or invest in a hedge fund. Risk is inherent in any economic activity, and it is not for the government to determine which risky behaviors Americans may or may not engage in.

The Internet is a powerful tool, and any censorship of Internet activity sets a dangerous precedent. Many Americans rely on the Internet for activities as varied as watching basketball games, keeping up on international news broadcasts, or buying food and clothing. In the last few years we have seen ominous signs of the federal government’s desire to control the Internet. The ostensible reasons are to protect Americans from sex offenders, terrorists, and the evils of gambling, but once the door is open to government intrusion, there is no telling what legitimate activity, especially political activity, might fall afoul of government authorities.

The ban on Internet gambling also forces financial institutions to act as law enforcement officers. This is another pernicious trend that has accelerated in the aftermath of the Patriot Act, the deputization of private businesses to perform intrusive enforcement and surveillance functions that the federal government is unwilling to perform on its own.

Mr. Chairman, while I am willing to support HR 2267 as a means to repeal the total ban on internet gambling, I urge my colleagues to oppose any attempt to tax internet gambling. Taxing any commercial transition, including gambling, is an unwarranted expansion of the taxing power and will cripple the development of internet commerce. Furthermore, since the power to tax is the power to destroy, imposing taxes on internet gambling could simply morph into a backdoor way of banning gambling on the internet. If opponents of the internet gambling ban are serious about expanding individual liberty, they will oppose restricting the freedom of internet users to do what they want with their time and property by imposing taxes on the bill.

In conclusion, I urge my colleagues to support Chairman Frank’s HR 2267. While not perfect these bills will take a step toward liberty by restoring the right of Americans to decide for them whether or not to gamble online.

I'll be honest and say that I only paid taxes on my gambling winnings one year. The first two years I didn't even think I had to pay in on that, my taxes were super simple and I was young, so yeah whatever. I paid the next year, then the UIGEA came and fucked everything, since then my profits have not really been so high (maybe like $7-8k a year?)

My problem with taxation on winnings is that current laws are completely ass-backwards on this - it's not just "how much did you net, pay taxes on that", it's "record every winning session as income and deduct the losses". Essentially you're asking me to report an extra $300k in income with a $293k deduction, which moves me into the highest tax bracket, wiping out all my profits. Of course my position on this is that the money has ALREADY been taxed; I mean I pay 30% or so income tax, so do my opponents...if he wins from me why does he have to pay taxes on money that was already taxed?

btw just to clarify I'm talking about doing it the proper way, as opposed to my recent method of "guess"

I think you'd have trouble defending the idea of a clearly defined chunk of money that gets taxed as income and then has done its tax work. What about sales tax when you buy something with your already taxed income? And then the tax that the shopkeeper has to pay, since after all your money is income to him. Then he dies and leaves some to his kids, and it gets inheritance taxed. Then they pay it as wages to the workers in the businesses they run...

yeah exactly, I'm not saying this is the only way in which our tax system is backwards, sales tax I don't mind because it's not much, but IMO this is mostly the same concept

taxing poker accounts is such a weird area because there are so many different points of taxation which you need to look at. obviously, you're hoping the government doesn't want to fleece their citizens and create a situation in which players who lost money on the year would have to pay in. I have a friend who went on a huge run and made about $8000 in a couple of weeks, but donked back $6000 of it and I would think lost about $3000 more through the course of the next year (PartyPoker, lol). Technically he still had to pay in on the $8k he won but can deduct the money he lost next year...however he didn't really have an income then so the end result (had he paid up proper) would be him losing money on poker, then paying taxes on the money he later lost and not really being able to deduct it later; I guess an equivilent for say, stock traders, would be to pay taxes on your "earnings" every time your stocks go up, then deduct every time they go down.

The other issue is that people in general are just not going to freely pay taxes on their winnings if they're not making a living off it. If a guy sells a TV in the paper for $400 I think there is about a 0.05% chance he's actually going to report that as income.