Australia is not the first country where banned poker.
I suggest to use programs to bypass the lock and continue playing.
Russia has blocked me play games Party Poker but I continue to play it (I use the code of another country).
As it has been mentioned before, there are options like VPN and offshore accounts for those willing to play online.
That
might work on some of the smaller sites, but as Zorba says, reputable sites like Stars will require you to prove that you've physically changed address first.
And they're wise to people using VPNs to bypass their security so they're on the lookout for stuff like that.
You'd basically be
gambling on them not finding out and banning your account.
Yes. That is true. But is it the case here? Did they ban poker because they couldn't tax the income? or just because they don't agree with people playing poker?
You'd have to go back a long way to find an answer to the "why" question - because remember, this ban dates back over 15 years. All that's happened recently is they've decided not to
lift that existing ban (yet).
I
suspect originally it was a mix of a few things: poker being lumped in with all other casino games, and the government not really being up to the task of regulating the industry, in a legal or technological sense. Remember this was the early 2000s, and the vast majority of providers were based in tiny overseas nations. It's only in recent years governments have worked out how to stop sites like The Pirate Bay - they would have had no hope effectively regulating something like online gaming back then, and the major players would have been less likely to play ball than they are now too.
As for why they didn't make the change
now, I suspect it's literally just because nobody thought about it. Like we've said, poker (both online and live) is TINY here. Sports betting, on the other hand, is massive so that's where the focus has been.
Hey Oz, do you have any idea what it would take to open "poker clubs" around town, that would be a profitable franchise to start around the suburbs.
I don't know much about the deal that Crown has with the state.
AINAL, but here goes...
Short answer is you can't do it.
Definitely not in any format that charges a rake or tournament fees. And one assumes you'd need to have something along those lines to be able to pay for dealers / tables / venue / etc.
If you're not taking rake then I dunno how you pay for it... does it basically become a self-dealt home game, just at a venue? Even then you'd still have expenses you'd need to cover.
As an aside, I have NFI how a lot of the pub poker leagues get away with doing what they do. A lot of them are free, but I know there are some that have cash buyins too. I think they disguise their tournament fees by having a minimum drinks spend or having a separate fee for "food" or whatever, but it's so transparent they probably shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.
The company I work for uses a different model, clients pay us to bring all the dealers / tables / etc to them and we run a tournament for them. The vast majority of them aren't played for money, they're just for a trophy and entertainment. Occasionally we'll have ones on private premises that do play for cash, but they pay us completely independently to that prize pool, we don't even handle their buyins.
