Kristi King

Texas Wesleyan University

White Collar Crime Fall 2011

Blog Comment: Full Tilt Poker

After reading Bailey’s comment, I started wondering how it was possible for Full Tilt Poker

to advertise on television legally. I do not gamble. Therefore, before reading about this, I was not

aware of the laws regarding online gambling. My step-dad has been doing it for years. I had no

clue it was illegal, but then again, I never really thought about it. I suspect others do not think

about the legality of it when they see advertisements on television either. From what I

understand, to begin playing poker via Full Tilt, you must first download the software package

located on fulltiltpoker.net. The software package has gaming tables for play money accounts.

These are the accounts that Full Tilt advertises on television. Because Full Tilt is only

advertising for the domain, fulltiltpoker.net, associated with play money poker, it is legal. The

thing is, the software also has the tables for the real money accounts, which enables players to

access the illegal gambling at fulltiltpoker.com by way of fulltiltpoker.net. At the bottom of

fulltiltpoker.com (illegal poker domain), the website states that gambling is not legal in all areas.

Therefore, the downloader is responsible for determining the laws in his or her area. This is

genius, yet they still screwed it up! It does not say anything about players playing at their own

risk. All they had to do was pay the winners! $390 million is a lot of freakin’ money! I do not

know how many persons had to actually split the house winnings from the website, but it was all

pretty much profit apart from advertising, software changes, and typical website

domain/maintenance costs. I mean I guess….lol! Whatever the case, these fools got greedy!

They probably could have flown under the radar for quite a while had they just paid. Now, Full

Tilt has shined a big fat spotlight on the entire Internet gambling industry. My thoughts, if

someone wants to throw their money away like a moron, then let them do it! It is called freedom!