“New Regulations for Online Gambling Welcome”

The World Trade Organization’s recent ruling that the U.S. can regulate online gambling has great significance for all involved in the online gambling industry. For implicit in this ruling is the fact, previously shrouded in ambiguity, that online gambling must be legal under international law.

Most online casino operators are greeting the recent WTO ruling, which allows the U.S. government to regulate Internet gambling, with joy. Rather than hindering their online gaming businesses, they feel that this kind of intervention can only help them grow and flourish. Regulations, laws and rules can only lend an air of legitimacy to the industry, something already proving to be true in the UK, where a new commission to police Internet gaming was recently established with the passage of the Gaming Law.

The WTO ruling makes it possible for U.S. government officials to regulate the online gambling industry in such a way as to prevent it from becoming completely crime-ridden. Governments will be able to draw up regulations that will prevent the kinds of crimes that offshore betting sites are most susceptible to – money laundering, fraud, the organized crime element – and thereby preserve the public order. The U.S. government has always played a role in regulating gambling on riverboats and land-based casinos, so it is understandable that it should play a role here too.

There is at least one person, however, who isn’t thrilled with the imminent changes in the online gambling world, and that person is Dennis Rose, president of one of the top three online casinos in the world, Casino Fortune. He worries that the whole atmosphere of the online gambling world – the casual, relaxed, enjoyable feeling surrounding players engaged in diversionary activities – will be compromised once the government starts treating it as a possible center of organized crime.

Nevertheless, Rose’s worries aren’t stopping him from branching out and expanding his site further. Currently Casino Fortune is beginning to focus on the “skilled wagering business,” a business based on a player’s skill rather than a player’s luck. With skilled wagering, players bet on games such as chess or solitaire – games of skill – rather than on games such as poker or craps, otherwise known as games of “chance.” Skilled gaming is regulated state-by-state, and skill, not luck, is the name of the game!