Yahoo! Poker

This is somewhat old news, but that doesn't mean I can't still add my two cents.

Yahoo! has recently gotten into the online poker market. They've had a play site, along with tons of other games for years, but just recently started offering real money poker for European players.

While it might be interesting that a big US based media company is getting in the game I didn't think it was all that noteworthy until I read a post on Lou Krieger's blog.

Lou mentions that Y! may be the first ISP to get into the market, they may not be the last as AOL already offers a play money poker game, and Windows includes holdem with the new Vista operating system. Lou speculates that it the UIGEA where repealed those companies and maybe others would offer real money poker to the US market.

I think this bodes well overall for our anti UIGEA/legal online gambling stance. If companies such as Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft want to get in on that action that has to be a good thing. They have money to throw around why wouldn't they be interested in spending a few million dollars here or there to get a slice of the billion dollar online gaming pie?

The more people, and companies, and most importantly companies with money that want gambling legalized, the better chance we have of making it so.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com