Online casino games and online poker are all the hype these days as more and more average Joes try their luck at winning it big. But online gambling and online poker isn’t all fun and games, especially in 2011. It’s been a rough year for poker players all around the world as the number one online gambling site has been charged with being behind a, “Ponzi Scheme”. A ponzi scheme works by having someone guarantee that they will invest someone’s money, to attract new clients the investor grants them large returns and therefore influences the investors to invite their friends. When the ponzi schemer has a large amount of clients he begins increasing the initial amount of money that is necessary to qualify for his investment. After there are old investors and new investors that both have their money tied up with the ponzi schemer, the ponzi schemer simply uses a fraction of the new investor’s capital to pay the old investors. Therefore there is no investing that is done by the ponzi schemer at all. He is just giving larger investor’s money to the older investors. The problem with ponzi schemes, however, is that it needs to be constantly increasing with larger investments from more investors in order to keep operating.
That is precisely why one of the best online poker sites crashed this year. A few professional poker players that had investments with the site were Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer including several others. Founder Raymond Bitar as well as countless others had their oversea bank accounts seized this year because they were several million in debt.
In other news, which doesn’t have anything to do with the online poker playing tragedy that every American in 2011 has had to face. The first German poker player to ever win the WSOP main event, which stands for the World Series of Poker, did just that. 22-year-old Pius Heinz took home a total of $8,715,638 on November 8th last month. The winner of the 50k buy-in Poker Player’s Championship was Brian Rast taking home $1,720,328, and the winner of the Six Handed No-Limit Hold’em Championship was Joe Ebanks taking home $1,158,481.
The state lottery operator of Loto-Quebec is hosting a poker tournament next year, which will offer the winner entry to the United States 1 million dollar buy-in tournament for the WSOP in 2012.
American online gamblers and poker players are heading over to play online in Canada. Professional poker player Daniel Negranu had to do so in order to take away $119,193 at the WCOOP this year, which stands for World Championship of Online Poker. In worst case scenarios, online poker players are resorting to having to actually change out of their pajamas and travel to their closest casino to take place in casino games or other sports betting.