Progress - West Virginia Has Become The Fifth State To Legalize Online Poker
Poker News - Five down, 45 to go.
The battle for online poker to be legalized in the United States took a positive turn on Wednesday when West Virginia became the fifth state to pass legislation regulating the activity. OnlinePokerReport was first with the news.
As for when online poker players in the state can expect to be dealt hands, OPR put forth an estimate of some time next year.
“Even in an aggressive timeline, it would seem like 2020 would be the earliest a launch would take place,” wrote Grant Lucas.
And West Virginia makes 5! Let’s gooooo West Virginia! I knew you guys were good for something besides biker meth and Rough n Rowdy. I knew it, and now West Virginia has proven me right by legalizing online poker. It’s such a no-brainer and it still baffles me each and every day that DFS is legal, the lottery is legal, but online poker is only legal in 5 states. Makes legitimately zero sense at all. But baby steps are being taken and now we are 10% of the way to full legality. It doesn’t seem like much, but life is a copycat league. We saw how quickly sports betting has blown up and spread state to state once they all saw how popular and profitable it was. Hopefully online poker can do the same on a smaller scale.
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It’ll never be like the old days where you were playing against a world-wide player pool and could win $25k from an $11 tournament. My biggest regret in life is I didn’t get really, really good at poker when it was at it’s peak. There was so, sooooo much money to be made because play pools were so massive and everyone was so bad. It was like printing money if you had a general understanding of how to play. All we need is for the entire country to legalize it and combine player pools, and we’ll have a mini-boom all over again. Money flowing like wine. It would be the greatest thing to ever happen to me.
But alas, for mostly political reasons, it’s still just a state to state grind to get it legalized, and then an addition grind for them to share a player pool. Hopefully all the states that are legalizing sports betting bring poker with them. Nothing is better than sitting on your couch on a Sunday and playing tournaments. Hopefully we’ll get that feeling back one day again. When I’m president, that’ll be the first thing I do.