A Turning Point

The online casino industry has grown more rapidly than anyone could ever have expected. New casinos are opening all the time, and companies from other sectors have opened casinos – the SkyVegas casino springs to mind - attracting whole new demographics of players.
Of course, the biggest online casino game remains poker. Although there are thousands of different games available at most casinos, poker is the one that draws the majority of the punters and often sees the biggest wins.
However, in recent years the online poker world has been restricted by legislation from the US which makes playing poker online for money illegal. The industry is reported to be worth as much a $6 billion a year, so it's no wonder that a lot of online casino representatives are pushing for poker to be legalised in the States.
At the moment, however, such moves have come to a standstill, and the FBI's recent raiding of three major online casinos on charges of laundering money relating to illegal online poker has thrown the matter even more into the spotlight.

This side of the Atlantic, things are a lot more serene, but nonetheless all eyes are cast towards the United States. The simple reason is that online casinos are global enterprises, if they're licensed to operate in a certain area, there's no reason why a player from the US (in theory) couldn't sit down at a table with someone from the UK, another from Germany, and someone else from Australia. In fact, the only restriction would be time zones.
This means that if the US market were to open up, there could potentially be an enormous influx of players and money into established European companies. This, of course, would raise the potential winnings when it came to tournaments, or simply the volume of people wanting to play, great news for European poker players, particularly those who play at a slightly higher level than the average punter.
Of course, all that remains to be seen, and there are many legislative hurdles to overcome before anyone in the United States plays poker online for money, and for the moment everything in the European market is going swimmingly. Still, the potential for even bigger jackpots and even higher quality competition remains ever present in the background.