I don't mean to be OT, but does anybody play online anymore? I paid my (cheap) rent in college playing on FullTilt and PokerStars, but the (unreasonable) gov't crackdown seems to have put an end to online play. Or is there a secret I'm not in on?
There's a couple of sites where you can still play, however there's not much action and you essentially can't cash out.
I have a buddy with ~200k on some network, I think merge, and he has a pending cashout for 2k (the max) that has been pending for months. He can't initiate another until the last has been resolved.
Until about a year ago (post-black-friday, of course) he was able to remove about 12-14k/year, given the wait time per check and the maximum of 2k per check.
The shutdown was only in the United States. You could cross the border to play freely. Inside the US, there's a couple of states that have legalized within-state play; other than that there are a few minor online venues (several hundred to a couple of thousand players online at any given time). I believe that r/poker has an updated list if you're interested.
Online poker for real money is still strong outside the USA, and there are a few state-specific enterprises (for example, wsop.com and--until recently--the unfortunately named Ultimate Poker in Nevada) starting for USA states that have specifically legalized online poker.
Seals With Clubs. Deposit bitcoin. Play with bitcoin. Withdraw bitcoin. Probably not legal in the U.S. but it's a great site (and they don't check your IP origin afaik, though you could probably get in with TOR or a proxy anyway).
