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Should You Play Online Poker on Unregulated and Unlicensed Sites, or Not?
- Updated: August 23, 2016
To play, or not to play. That is the question that millions of online poker enthusiasts have to answer due to the constantly evolving online poker regulatory landscape.
Whether or not you have unfettered access to online poker is vastly dependent on where you live, since laws and regulation surrounding the game are constantly being added or amended. For those fortunate enough to live somewhere smart enough to legalize and regulate online poker, there is not much of a debate. However, in areas where online poker is restricted, there are more than a handful of sites which operate outside of the law and are unlicensed and unregulated.
While we at PokerNews certainly do not support unregulated poker rooms, we do realize that players will still take chances to play the game they love. But should they? We look at both sides of the argument.
Play if You Wish, But Be Careful
I’m not going to pretend you’re not putting your money at risk playing on any of the unlicensed and unregulated online poker sites available to US players. Instead, I’m going to embrace the idea. After all, isn’t poker all about taking calculated risks to begin with?
I’m certainly not suggesting you leave tens of thousands of dollars in limbo on these sites. For goodness sake, cash out large amounts as soon as you can. But if you like playing real money online poker for affordable stakes in the privacy of your own home while you wait for painfully slow legislators across the country to make it legal, these offshore sites the Department of Justice continues to ignore are your best bet.
After all, the chances that you run kings into aces for your entire bankroll seems infinitely greater than the sites cutting and running with your money, the DOJ finally getting around to shutting them down, or somebody hacking your account and dumping the cash into theirs. As long as you’re being smart about it, and playing with money you can afford to lose, any one of these scenarios actually happening can simply be chalked up to another bad beat, and if you can’t handle one of those, you shouldn’t really be playing poker to begin with.
Last I checked, this was the United States of America: The land of the free and the home of the brave. When it comes to online poker, the average American’s freedoms have been limited over the years, but this is a still a place where we’re free to play on any online poker site we like until the DOJ comes knocking at the door. It’s also a country where fortune favors the bold, and particularly in poker, those who take the biggest risks, reap the biggest rewards.
In what would have to be considered a worst-case scenario, the DOJ will finally get around to actively pursuing these grey-market operators and shut …
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