Cleaning up Poker.

If you were an outsider looking in at Online poker, what would you do to insure the integrity of Online Poker? Now keep in mind us Poker players are going to want this and that, but not that or the other thing. But you have the ability to insure (as much as possible) that there would be no cheating.

I think.....

1. Once you establish an indentity online, that is yours no matter where you play.

2. You must play a tournament on 1 ISP. If your Internet fails during a tournament, you mus pre-register another ISP in order to finish the tournament.

Any other thoughts?

It's a little late for unique identities. Try telling the 50 'joeblow' ID's on 50 sites that 49 of them have to give up their ID.

The '1 ISP' concept you mention is for tournaments only. There are too many reasons to list here why people use more than 1, and they can be quite legitimate reasons. There are a lot of players who never play in MTT's, not to mention cases, like my own, where there are 2 of us here who play but cannot from one machine. When my SO wants to play, she goes to a neighbor's house to use their computer. Since we have 2 accounts at the same address, we do have to play in different games.

We could all come up with tons of ideas. Some might work, some not.

What I think the online poker industry needs is a central, international regulating commission. Besides establishing 'safe and fair' mandates that would require poker sites to meet certain standards in order to receive their 'certification', they could also establish an international clearing house that would maintain a database much like credit reporting agencies. It would include a list of those banned from a site for cheating in any form. It would be similar to the clearing agency used by banks to check a new customer's application for an account. If you are on the 'bad customer' list, you do not get an account.

As it is now, any player banned from a site simply goes to one of the myriad of other sites to ply their cheating trade.

The industry itself has to make the first move to assure customers they operate fairly. Their lack of interest in such a move does give us cause to ponder why they have not done so yet. When these companies make millions of dollars EVERY DAY in rakes and players still deposit BILLIONS of dollars into their sites, why would they want to fix what they do not think is broken?

If your customers were depositing billions into YOUR account, willingly, would you want to rock the boat or question the result?

Dynamic IP addresses (which most have) would make this pretty hard.

Lift the US (and other country) bans.

Legitimise the game and it can be better regulated.

There is no doubt that online poker sites are ripping people off left n right.The usa goverment could be getting alot of this money by taxing and regulating online poker.until this happens they arent gonna self govern themselves

Online poker is already taxed. If you win, you have to pay taxes on these winnings. As for regulation, I disagree that the federal government should be doing anything to interfere with a legitimate business. That's how business works, if people demand safeguards for cheating, they'll demand it, and boycott sites that don't. As it is, everyone would rather play with the risk of cheating than not at all (or put pressure on sites to form some kind of central agency). I don't think it's a huge deal right now. I'm sure some will cheat, but that's going to happen, and I personally am fine with the way it is now. They do have an interest in catching cheaters, because first off they can make an example out of them, and how good their anti-cheating mechanism is, as well as getting to confiscate the money in their account.

Does online poker really have credibility issues. There are plenty other businesses, government included, with much greater integrity issues than online gambling, particularly poker.
How many outlets are there of independent information? If you go through this site you know which sites are pulling one over you and where is legit. When was the last big cheating scandal online.
The old brick and mortar has bigger issues.

I'd say there is CONSIDERABLE doubt that poker sites are ripping people off left, right, or any other direction. As for the "USA government", all poker sites currently operating are locaed outside the US, making regulation a little beyond their reach. Look at the #s of US players currently playing online, despite the proactive internet gaming restrictions currently in place.

Just what to you percrive as in need of "self governing their own selves"?

This isn't a prelude to an "OMG it's rigged" discussion, is it?

Nice thought, but these sites operate from foreign countries. As much as our legislators try to tell other countries what they should do I can already hear the response from foreign governments about us (the USA) trying to regulate their companies.

About the "other country" bans, if the sites cannot and will not regulate or scrutinize themselves, how would several country's governments ever agree on anything? Especially to mandate to third party poker countries?

Nick--I could be wrong here, but what I think many people are saying is, set up a USA based poker site. Let it be run, controlled and regulated by US laws under fairness, and the freedoms of US. Therefore, the amount of $$ generated for the US would be huge, and we could better trust that we wouldn't get screwed.

Of course business and Government in the US is ALWAYS on the up and up so all sense of uneasiness would be gone! :S

That's the thing though - as of now, they all operate out of foreign countries by necessity. If they could set up in the US (or even better, set up in multiple countries) things like payouts could be streamlined and there'd at least be some legal recourse for people in the event of a dispute with a site. I'm not saying the latter should be required all that often, but in terms of "ensuring the integrity" in the eyes of someone new to the whole thing, it'd probably go some way just knowing the option was there.

As I mentioned, I trust pokerstars enough to have my money on their site. They've always been great with support and are a pleasure to do business with. That's how the free market works. I realize that it's possible for pokerstars to just take my money and run, but they'd have no point because they'd lose out on all future rake when the story got out that all the money was gone. Meanwhile companies like Enron, supposedly regulated, end up corrupt and ****ed tons of people out of their money.