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bookie operations is certainly one that is
shaping some industries, and creating some others. Before we look for the
answers to those questions, let's explore what the actions of certain
parties might lead us to believe.
For example, the traditional credit card
processors (MC, VISA, AMEX, PayPal, and others) decided to discontinue use
of their credit card services to fund player's online poker accounts.
Today, there's a whole cottage industry that has sprung up to fill the
enormous demand for transferring funds between bank accounts and online
poker room accounts, processing untold millions of dollars each day.
Try advertising a poker-related item
through Google's AdWords or the Yahoo/MSN equivalent (Overture) and you'll
quickly find they have a category known as "Gambling URL"
that'll come into play. Any website that could be related to online poker
rooms is considered a "gambling" site and advertising services
are thereby refused. So, what happened as a result? Well, aside from these
companies losing advertising revenues, it's forced the poker industry into
fierce competition for the poker-related search "namespaces".
Try searching for something using keywords like "Texas Holdem poker"
and see what you find.
It's amazing at how clogged up the search
engine namespace has become, with every search engine optimization (SEO)
technique and trick known to man being used by poker website owners in an
attempt to gain visibility, page ranking and routing of more visitor
traffic to their websites.
In my opinion, the answer to the question
"Is playing poker gambling?" is - it depends. It depends on the
player's skill level. If you're a ... » read more |
