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There is an interesting part of the legislation that is working its way through the California legislature to legalize online poker in the state. The existing casinos and cardrooms in the state would not be allowed to set up "online poker rooms" and this also means other businesses could not have poker parlors or poker clubs where people could congregate to play online poker.
I wrote about it on my website here: http://alanbestbuys.com/id145.html
This is fairly inconsequential.
It is not prohibiting casinos or poker rooms from setting up online poker sites.
It is prohibiting online poker from being played in special rooms being set up solely for online poker play.
So for example, the Commerce Casino could run an online poker room, but they could not provide computers to players in their brick and mortar casino to play on it.
Why do you call it inconsequential?
Casinos would love an online room so players could walk over to another room to play brick and mortar games.
You should talk to casino owners so you understand their interests.
My understanding is that the large casino's and poker clubs have already aligned themselves with existing sites like pokerstars, party poker, etc. It seems the only thing that is holding this bill back is something they refer to as "previous bad actor clause" ie pokerstars. Half of the indian casino's want the language in the bill and the other half do not.
The original thing holding the bill back was the horse racing industry who will now get paid $60 million a year for not challenging the bill.
Hopefully they can figure out a compromise on the "bad actor" language, and get the bill passed.