Huge news in the world of online poker.  Apparently, there may be pending legislation that would legalize online poker (yay!) but anyone wanting a license would have to pull out of the US market for a blackout period of 15 or so months (doh!)  This will probably means I can't play on the any of the major sites (Stars and FT in particular) for over a year.

Here is NoahSD's cliff notes (BTW, this is an excellent cliff notes thread, so check regularly for new developments):
However, there are some pretty huge negatives that are causing some people to argue that this bill could be worse than the status quo. Probably the biggest is a 15-month "blackout" in which no sites would be allowed to legally serve the US. If this ends up in the bill and the bill passes, the consensus is that the more "legit" sites like Stars and FTP will pull out of the US market and wait to get licenses. Sites that pretty much have no chance of getting a license like Bodog will probably stick around.

Non-US players won't be allowed to play on US-based sites. So that would be something like the equivalent of Stars.fr and FTP.fr. A while from now, they might be allowed in, but the default is no. Stars and FTP will have no reason to stop serving non-US players during the blackout, but of course during the blackout they'll have basically no US players if this happens, so that'll hurt their traffic a ton I imagine.

Needless to say, a bunch of regs are freaked out.  But I don't think the blackout is going to be that big a deal.  The US market accounts for over $1 BILLION in rake annually.  Unless there is further adverse legislation, I just can't imagine this money will just be left on the table during the blackout period.  Even a small share of ONE BILLION DOLLARS is more money than most of the lesser poker sites will see in their lifetimes.  So does it really matter if they don't get licensed?  If someone told you would could make the same amount of money in fifteeen months of the status quo (not illegal, btw) as you could in a whole lifetime of regulated poker, which would you take?  I mean it's really a no-brainer.

When I look at PokerScout's listing of online poker sites, there are THIRTEEN poker sites/networks that *currently* cater to US players.  Are you telling me that a site like Yatahay, WSEX, FirstFidelity, Betraiser or Legendz, isn't drooling at the prospect of a Stars-free, FT-free and Cake-free online poker environment?  Shoot!  I just listed the bottom 5, but Bodog (which was mentioned by NoahSD), Everleaf or PokerPros could step up.  Shoot!  If I had any kind of poker site experience, I would probably start up my own site!  So you can be sure a bunch of new sites will pop up.

It really doesn't matter if they have no volume now, as long as they have the scalable infrastructure.  As soon as a BILLION DOLLARS IN RAKE starts itching to play, the volume will magically appear.  It may be a slight challenge getting the fish aware of the other sites (as they may only know of FT and Stars).  But I think those desperate to gambool will find their way.  Other issues will include sub-par software, mediocre customer service, etc, but hey!  It's only for 15 months.

Continued in a later post...