\nA California tribe says it will begin taking real-money wagers on its online poker site later this month. The Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel made waves last month when it announces the launch of PrivateTable.com, an online poker site operated by the tribe\u2019s Santa Ysabel Interactive. The site has offered only play-money poker to date but Dave Vialpando, chairman of the Santa Ysabel Gaming Commission, says the site will begin dealing real-money poker \u201csometime between the 26th and 28th\u201d of August.<\/p>\n
\tIn an interview with CardPlayer, Vialpando said the real-money wagering will be restricted to California residents aged 18 years or older, and only when said individuals are physically present within state borders. Vialpando said the tribe continues to support efforts by state politicians to pass an online poker bill but was nonetheless \u201cmoving full speed ahead\u201d following the failure of said efforts to progress in the current legislative session.<\/p>\n
\tThere remains some debate as to whether PrivateTable\u2019s real-money offering is legally permissible. Vialpando insists that PrivateTable falls under the category of Class II gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and thus the tribe\u2019s right to offer such activity from its reservation \u201cis not prohibited by any statute.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAs for why no other federally recognized California tribe has so far chosen to exercise this option, Vialpando suggested it could be because of a belief that online poker might cannibalize brick-and-mortar casino revenue. Vialpando also noted that his tribe\u2019s creation of its own online poker regulatory framework had been \u201cvery labor intensive\u201d and other tribes might prefer to pass that burden onto state legislators.<\/p>\n
\tWhile PrivateTable has yet to be the subject of any legal efforts to block its activity, that may change as the clock counts down to its targeted real-money launch. Apart from the issue of whether the federal government would choose to dispute the tribe\u2019s view of IGRA\u2019s definitions, the state\u2019s larger tribes already have enough difficulty dismantling barriers to consensus without the distraction of an online outlier going rogue.<\/p>\n
\tConsumer confidence may also inhibit PrivateTable\u2019s real-money plans, as concerns have been voiced over Finpay, the site\u2019s designated payment processor. Finpay appears to have no other business links beyond PrivateTable but Finpay CEO Chris Wolfington was also CEO of Money Centers of America, a company that processed check payments for tribal brick-and-mortar casinos until it filed for bankruptcy protection in March. The Ho-Chunk Nation, which operates six casinos in Wisconsin, and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians in Minnesota, are owed a combined $10.4m from Money Centers.<\/p>\n
\tThe Santa Ysabel tribe operated a brick-and-mortar casino on its tribal lands in San Diego County but the casino filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and shut down for good this February after racking up debts of over $50m. The PrivateTable site licensed its software from IG Soft\/Dobrosoft, the same group powering the Winning Poker Network. The tribe has struck an \u201cinter-Jurisdictional agreement\u201d with the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake, which has agreed to host PrivateTable\u2019s \u201cprimary\u201d servers.<\/p>\n
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A California tribe says it will begin taking real-money wagers on its online poker site later this month. The Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel made waves last month when it announces the launch of PrivateTable.com, an online poker site operated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}