Nevada Would Benefit From Federal Poker Standards

South Point Poker made history earlier this week when it became the first casino in the USA to be licensed to operate a real-money online, in-state poker website. Lawrence Vaughan, the Chief Operating Officer, predicts that the website will launch in just two month’s time.

While this is great news for Nevada based citizens, and the state of Nevada itself, it’s only the first step, and hopefully the road to federal poker standards won’t be a long one. The headaches that operators would have trying to manage 50 different sets of rules for different poker networks across America would be spectacular, and there’s really no sense in every state having different rules for what is, essentially, a virtual product.

Nevada has pioneered online poker, and they’re well positioned to lead the way to federal regulation. The industry is certainly a valuable one. Before the events of Black Friday in 2011, American online poker players were spending as much as $26 billion each year on internet poker websites. Closing those websites down has forced many Americans to stop playing poker, but the demand is still there, and if that industry were federally regulated it would be incredibly lucrative from a taxation point of view.

Running those poker websites would create jobs, too, which is something that congress should be eager to benefit from. Now if only lawmakers could agree on the finer points of gambling rules.

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