The final regulations are 66 pages long and there's no way I'm immediately reading them when other people can do it for me (I'll do it later), but the gist appears to be this:

-Withdrawals are not blocked in any way (THANK YOU BABY JEBUS)

-Electronic deposits (including echecks) are blocked via a continually updated blacklist [edit: scratch that. Instead, it looks like each bank develops its own policies and "somehow" makes sure that cross border transactions aren't used for gambling.]

-Paper deposits are not blocked (more than they were; WU/MG, for example, "cannot be used for gambling" even though that's never stopped any sportsbook from simply rotating different names to send money to every few days)

-The compliance deadline is 12/2009

2+2 has predictably panicked. Personally, I think this is close to the best case scenario possible. It's by far the best case for every American pro on the Internet, since we can all simply swap funds with each other and our main concern was always withdrawing. In fact, if anything, I expect this to mean the end of obnoxious people asking for big vigs on online/live swaps - I never believed in making anyone pay to simply swap funds and I'm not about to change that belief now that large amounts of online money are, theoretically, harder to come by. At any rate, in practice, every pro on the Internet has lots of friends from different countries to swap with.

I suppose depositing will probably get harder. In practice, though, few credit cards worked to deposit with for years, so most casual players I know that didn't have friends with poker money used pre-paid cards, some ewallet that charged a huge fee (is this the end of US ewallets? maybe, but on the other hand, not all of them should instantly get blacklisted), or Western Union, which will work about as well as it always has. It's the end of American-based deposit bonuses, but the good times for those things ended around 2005. [edit: Upon further review, this is even more toothless. No bank in its right mind is ever going to review every outgoing transaction for gamblingness, so what they will do instead is have customers sign a "no gambling" waiver and wash their hands of it afterwards. Once again, thank you, Baby Jebus.]

On top of that, it gives a year's grace for compliance, which means an entire year for getting UIGEA repealed to begin with. The chances aren't enormous, but I'd say we're favorites to do it within two years. The climate is right.

At any rate, barring anything horrible I've yet to read, US online poker seems to have dodged a huge bullet.

I think it's a great outcome. Many of you undoubtedly disagree. Let's set that aside from now on and hope Obama is a good leader (and, oh yeah, fixes online poker and stuff).

While I type up a full postmortem, here's what happened on Intrade last night:

Before election day, I had a solid plan backed up by a decent sized investment fund that I promised would have a conservative approach. With an effective six figures on the site, I could both move my own lines when I wanted them to move and spread out my picks so that the fund would get the safer, conservative lines while my own money went to riskier, but higher return lines. What I wound up doing was to park the bulk of the money in the main President contracts and their derivatives because of their liquidity, then spread the rest out to state and Senate races. The fund mostly focused on complete locks like PA, IA and WI; my own account was riskier and had large positions all over the map. Both, however, had much bigger sums bet on the very early poll closing states (VA, NC) and at the end (CO, NV) than the ones in the middle (MO). The reasoning was that either the early states would close and I would have the money freed up to roll over to the late time zones, or I'd see the danger signs coming and be able to get away from the late betting while I could. In addition, every contract had sales posted at 5 or 95, in order to release the cash ASAP.

Even the best laid plans do not survive first contact with the enemy. Instead of an orderly rolling out of results, what happened was that the first set of states was the closest and the polls were off in exactly VA (where I had lots of money) and IN (where I put in a lot after initially seeing good numbers; I overestimated the turnout in Lake County) while being on the dot everywhere else. Especially given Intrade's terrible layout and that I was juggling two accounts over multiple browser windows, I was forced to focus on those early, unexpectedly close contracts and couldn't keep up with the rest, which were doing what I wanted them to, anyway. As a result, while I eventually made a nice profit on IN (down a few hundred)/NC (up a few hundred)/VA (huge win)) combined, all of the other contracts duly released at 95 and I mostly lost out on those final 5 points while being unable to really coordinate things the way I wanted. I also wound up negative in MO and on Franken, although for small amounts.

With that said, the site didn't go down, I did eventually make the right calls in most places, the night was very positive overall, and even with the missing 5 points and unwieldiness relative to market size, the investment fund did very well, posting a 13.5% ROI (including Intrade's gigantic fees, mind you) in two weeks.

Next time - and there will be a next time - I will be ready for all of that, the market will be even more crushed, and I'll probably gloat about it somewhere.

Tomorrow will bring two things: the election of Barack Obama (no jinx plz) and the end of my year-long Intrade experiment. Although I'll leave some cash on the site to experiment with, it'll be the end of me obsessively refreshing 538.com every half hour, pouring over every poll internal and following returns by county while lining up the next state to roll over the profits according to the time their polls close.

I'll miss it :(

I promised myself I'd write a summary and postmortem of the Intrade experiment, and I'm already working on it in my head. It'll be a very long article that I will likely be putting up on the 5'th or 6'th, after my hangover wears off. It'll be interesting to see how much of what I write at the end of this long, strange trip applies in '10 and '12 - you can be sure I'll be back at it next time, probably using 100% of the cash I can spare.

In the meantime, here's who to vote for. If you're a McCain supporter, I apologize in advance. If you're voting for Obama, there's a party at my friend's house tomorrow - PM me for directions.

After that...time for poker. I'm already antsy to get some hands of cash in. It's been a while, but I haven't forgotten how to play and I'm anxious to prove it to a few MSNL regs :)

First, the very short term: I'll most likely have another article on P5's either this weekend or on Monday. It'll be about Obama and poker - I'll have to post an exact topic and maybe repost the article after I write it, but if you've been reading the blog or my posts on 2+2, you already know most of what I think on the subject. Suffice to say I am optimistic about the chances of a UIGEA repeal under Obama and feel that the game would be better off with him in office. (I also did make a CR video - it should be up sometime next week.)

Second, in a surprising development, the AP/UB story is *still* slated on 11/9 and might actually stay there :) (If not, it shouldn't be pushed back past 11/16.) For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Washington Post on the newspaper and online side of the story, and they'll be hosting an online, live Q&A segment for an hour or so the day after it is released. It'll be in an ESPN-type live blog format where people ask questions and my answers are released one at a time; I have to admit I'm looking forward to it a little bit because it'll be the day after 60M airs and seeing myself getting interviewed by Steve Kroft on national television, then answering questions about it is gonna be kinda cool. At any rate, I don't have the URL yet but will post it on the Sunday of the story.

About myself: Unlike Bond, who is a sicko to begin with and who's without a girlfriend for a month, I'm a lazy, lazy man and have my wife with me. Therefore, I'm continuing to focus on Intrade and only play on Sundays until the election. My schedule during this time period is only a handful of the bigger tournaments, so I was fairly sure that I was going to have zero decent results for a while. This last Sunday, however, I did wind up making an FT of a small major, the Cake 50K warmup event. Although I promptly finished ninth and didn't really make any money (and was annoyed with that enough not to post it immediately or on Monday), it's nice that I'm getting there. I also find myself posting on 2+2 again and thinking about hands, which is usually a sign that I'd like to, like, make money and stuff. After my 11/5 post-electoral hangover wears off, I will be spending a lot of time on my game, both on Cake and elsewhere.

I never really "quit" doing CR so much as I just quit playing tournaments (outside of Sundays, at any rate.) As you guys know, for the last two months I've been concentrating on politics (Obama '08? More like my wallet '08) and haven't been playing much. That, in turn, has led to zero decent hand histories worth submitting to CR and zero videos - I keep my standards kinda high and don't really want to do a vid about any old tourney with no interesting hands. But CR has recently asked me to do a leakfinder video, which doesn't involve my own HH's, and I'll likely get to that on Saturday. This'll be kinda interesting because the HH they gave me is one of my students', so he'll get a free session at the cost of having all his leaks pointed out to a few hundred people. I'll have to ask him how that turned out a few weeks afterwards.

The bad news is I had a Washington Post photographer over for their online version of the AP story and asked him about the timeframe. It looks like it's getting pushed back again, this time to after the election. The new date is 11/9 - hopefully that's the last one, but, y'know, as long as they air it this year I'll be happy.