James McManus recently wrote an excellent summary of unfortunate unraveling of online poker in the US this year.

I remain surprised at how surprised everyone seems to be at the unraveling of the poker ecosystem.  You needed no expertise at all to realize that the legal framework in which PokerStars and FullTilt were operating in was, at the very best, dark gray, and likely explicitly illegal.  Now, you might think, so are speeding and jaywalking, and despite being illegal (or nearly so), you might choose to do it anyway.  Fair enough.

But people were trusting these guys with a lot of money.  McManus reports having close to $20K in PokerStars when assets were frozen, and many people had much, much, more.  People seemed to trust that the operators were ringfencing the client deposits from the operating expenses … Read More »