dmorris68
Legend
Loyaler
At the federal level, no. As DJ said, a few states have outlawed it.huh? online poker in the usa is illegal?
Aside from those exceptional states, a lot of people have the mistaken impression that online poker is "illegal" in the US. This is largely due to the FUD spread by the DOJ in years past.
The UIGEA never mentioned poker, nor did it declare what types of gaming were and were not legal. It simply made it illegal for financial institutions to process funding for online gaming that was already deemed illegal via established law. And no federal law ever deemed online poker illegal. For a long time the DOJ trotted out The Wire Act (passed in 1961, long before the concept of online gaming, and dealing primarily with interstate sportsbetting) as it's basis for declaring online poker illegal, but fortunately came to their senses and announced last year that it did not in fact apply to online poker. Conveniently enough for them, however, it did not change their plan with regards to the Black Friday charges, because they were charging Stars and FT with other crimes such as money laundering... which the sites were "forced" into to continue servicing the US due to the misapplied UIGEA situation. It's not an excuse for the lengths the sites went to to keep us playing, and certainly not an excuse for the shenanigans Tilt pulled in running their operation, but it's still pretty scummy of the DOJ in how they dealt with the whole mess.
But back to the point, again, online poker has never been illegal in the US at the federal level.