EPN bans Canadian players from their network
EPN Ban Players
In an effort to ensure that the US department of Justice don’t interfere with their operations the EPN have banned players from 5 additional countries
Even months after April 15th 2011 also known as Black Friday, the events are still being felt around the poker playing world as the Entraction Poker Network (EPN) bans players from five more countries. People living in Russia, Israel, Norway, Canada and Turkey can no longer play poker on the EPN. The reasons for this are that the bosses at the EPN fear a repeat of the action taken by the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) in these countries where online gaming has also either been banned or subject to extra scrutiny.
There is a subtext here though and that is the fact that the EPN was recently taken over by the company IGT which is based in the USA. This brings them a step closer to falling foul of the US DoJ themselves as well as making it more difficult for them to obtain a gaming license in the USA once the law is changed. No online gaming company wants to be in the position whereby the law is changed but they are blacklisted for providing gambling services to American citizens at such time as those services were considered illegal. The American market represents the single biggest online gaming market in the world and everyone wants a piece of it.
Although online gambling in Canada is banned in general the specifics of the law have been left vague creating a grey area whereby Canadian citizens by and large are still able to gamble. In the other four countries blacklisted by EPN the law is the same as currently exists in the United States which is a ban on electronic money transfers from online credit merchants. It is generally expected that the laws against online gaming will be changed with a Bill already being debated by congress and several states, most notably Nevada already having drafted their own legislation allowing online gaming the moment Washington DC makes the big change.
Ironically Washington DC has legalised online poker within the municipal limits of the city. A quirk of the law ensures that the capital city is the only one in the country that has the authority to do it. The scheme is comparatively new and is expected to bring in millions of extra dollars every year to the city’s coffers to spend on various municipal projects. Millions of avid poker fans in the United States are waiting for the ban to end so that they can legally play their favourite game.
