Online Gambling - and Casino Info

While the enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act that the federal government has put forth recently has not been successful in curbing online gambling in the country, it has had the effect of causing some online gambling operators to voluntarily exit the market. One such operator is Microgaming and when they exited the market last week they took all of their online casinos, online poker rooms and other online gambling facilities with them. The end result is that right now people from the United States are not able to play in any of the Microgaming installations of online gambling and even people with active accounts in good standing have been blocked from playing and had their money returned.

For the average online gambler in the United States, the exit of Microgaming from the US market represents a big blow to online gambling in the country. Microgaming is easily the most reputable online gambling company in the world at the current moment in time and because of that there are many people that are predicting that the UIGEA, rather than helping the fight against predatory online gambling institutions, have done nothing but remove the good ones and leave the bad. Microgaming is one of the few online gambling institutions that have never had any complaints against it in terms of fraud or abuse and this is because they have a strict code of conduct that they force all of their member websites to follow. This in turn results in games that are self-regulated in a way that the government should be regulating them right now and for that reason grateful US patrons in the past have rewarded Microgaming by giving them almost the entire market in the United States.

With Microgaming gone however, many of the online gambling websites that offered fair play in the same way that their offline counterparts did have now gone away from the US market, leaving a lot of untested and probably unfair websites in their wake to pick up the slack. With the fair assumption that people that are involved in online gambling now will continue to be involved in online gambling even with the exit of their favorite online casino, the only conclusion that can be reached is that the aftermath of the implementation of the UIGEA by the federal government has been to create a set of conditions in the US market that have resulted in poorer and less fair online gambling operations taking over a larger amount of the market share. Once again it seems as though poor US policy has made things worse with no chance at all of making them better.

There are online gambling advocacy groups however that have stepped forward and are now interested in making up for the slack left by Microgaming. These groups have put forward a number of online gambling institutions that are reasonably reputable and fair and still operate inside the United States. They won’t replace Microgaming, but they will at least allow US patrons to avoid potential problem spots online.

Online Gambling Provides Stable Investment Opportunities

In the words of many of the influential media personalities within the United States, the government has let the American people down. With the credit crunch and then the housing market collapse, the United States government was caught with no legislation and with their pants down when it came to both of those events. Even though a handful of people knew what was going on, what is painfully obvious right now is that the American government didn’t and for that reason many of the people that invested in companies they thought were secure are now really starting to feel the pain of the situation.

For this reason, it is perhaps ironic that a lot of investors are now starting to take a serious look at online gambling as a way to invest their money. There are very few safe havens in the world economy at the moment, but there are many people that are starting to transfer money into online gambling in the hopes that it will massively expand over the next couple of decades and make them back a lot of the money they ended up losing when all the chips were down. Online gambling has provided a stable investment opportunity to many of these people and the irony of the situation is very delicious indeed.

Why is the situation ironic? Well, many people that follow the online gambling industry will of course remember the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The UIGEA was a piece of legislation that single-handedly cut the market for online gambling in half. It was passed by legislators that were on a witch hunt against online gambling and their associated financial institutions and without any thought as to the lives they would affect or the jobs they would destroy, the legislators passed the bill and gloated about it to their socially conservative constituents. A similar voice in the field that was ignored was that of people invested in offline gambling companies, because naturally the competition would pose a threat to the value of their stock.

And that second voice that is often ignored in this discussion of history is the one that makes this situation ironic. It is ironic because even though the industry was cut in half when the gambling act was passed, online gambling operations eventually recovered and game back into the fold with a diversified player base and therefore stronger than ever. It is this diversification and ironically enough the effects of the UIGEA that have created a stronger online gambling industry and it is an industry that is now poised to outpace its offline counterpart. Even conservative estimates see the industry as growing to more than 100 times its current size within a decade as well as overtaking offline gambling operations in its worldwide capitalization within the lifetime of the current generation.

With all of these sound prospects, the very same investors that spearheaded the UIGEA are now crawling to online gambling in the hopes that it will help save them from bankruptcy. Such irony does not come along that often in life.